If I'm not mistaken UC Davis was an affiliate member of the PAC-10 for wrestling.previously . It was the only official D-I program at the school when UCD was still D-II I believe, although water polo mostly played D-I programs.

Like with wrestling I think this is just the PAC-12 looking to fill out schedules since not all full members participate.

I think for the PAC-12 to add UCD as a full member it would require a major improvement in the football program and the stadium. If UCD could pull it off they would be happy to drop Colorado State or Utah.

Perhaps Tommy Nicholson's wife (if he has one) will become UCD's nterim AD at some point. Then he and Ron Gould will truly be on opposite paths.

They need to do something about that WAC tournament. That a team with such a poor record would get into the tournament is ridiculous. Maybe they should reduce the field to four teams (the best 2 from each division) or six (with the top in each division getting a bye). The WAC is already a weak conference in baseball, evidenced by the fact that teams transitioning from D-Ii (Grand Canyon and Cal Baptist have done this) just walk right in and wipe the floor with the existing teams. Utah Valley needs to go back to the D-II or JC level.

Ron Gould, per Wikipedia is an assistant at Stanford. Looks like he and Tommy Nicholson are on opposite career paths.

I noticed she chose not to get married until 45 and to not have children. Not that choosing not to have children makes someone unfeeling, but I think she would have more compassion toward her student-athletes if she had a family of her own. This is someone who is one-minded, overly-driven, and her behavior was never really checked because she produced the results, so it got further out of hand.

I think a shake-up of WAC baseball membership is not too far off. More and more Texas schools joining. How long before they want to be their own conference ? There is a precedent of a group of Texas schools joining together and then splitting.

They were right about Reggie Christiansen though. He is a visionary. Before the 2021 season he proposed breaking up the conferences and going with geographic alignments. I don't know if Stanford and Cal would like being in a conference with UCD (probably not), but I agree with the principle.

At the very least the Big West + West Coast Conferences should be broken up, the CA reams should leave the WAC and MWC, Utah should be booted from the PAC-12 and Hawaii from the Big West.

For example these teams should be in the same conference to be sure:

UCD
Sac State
UOP

UCR
Cal Baptist

UCSD
SDSU
USD

There are certainly enough teams to let the PAC-12 remain mostly intact while forming northern and southern conferences. I imagine the biggest obstacle is money.

I think they are over-selling the Sac State ballpark a bit. The new scoreboard is very nice, but I get the odd feeling when I see the ballpark like they're going to dismantle it and pack it into trucks at the end of the county fair like a carnival ride. One thing that really isn't fan friendly-with no press box their equipment is under a tarp up on poles. Anyone sitting behind home plate has to be high up to be able to see anything.

Sac State men's basketball is fast becoming the land of misfit toys. One of the keys to the team's success will be if the new coach manages to work with all the transfers maintain or improve Katz' system of making sure the players succeed in the classroom. They don't need to backslide into the pre-Katz era problems of academic problems.

It could, but thse days a recruit could get most of the information they need about a school they're considering online.

Ideally you would want student-athletes to pick schools that match up with their academic goals, but even UCD gets a few who don't feel that way exactly. I believe the best a student-athlete can reasonably hope for is they wind up at a college they like, that will help them reach their academic goals, that will have a highly competitive team of which they can be an integral part. If the most important of those things is the competitiveness that's a misplaced priority in my opinion.

Nice to see the silly measure failure. Just goes to show that student initiatives usually mean squat.

Yeah, I don't know that they were saying what they really meant. Sac State's baseball team was pretty bad in the Big West, so the affiliate talk may have been a misdirection.

Sac State was in the Big West for baseball only as recently as 2002. They were asked to leave because the Big West didn't want affiliate members.

Sac State would have to drop their Big Sky affiliations except for football.

Financial concerns may make this a reality though in the future. I don't see UCD ever moving to a full Big Sky or WAC membership for the same concerns raised in the article. Baseball will not dictate what they do.

Fastball velocity, as you know, can be improved as a pitcher adds strength and matures physically so 88 out of HS is a pretty good start.

So it's Judge BARNES and Daniel NOBLE No way !

One thing I know everybody already knows but I am emphasising is that regardless of what the students do UC Davis would still be the Aggies. All they are potentially changing is the mascot that shows up at the games that they mostly don't attend and that gets printed on merchandise the university sells. And even then doesn't the university have the final say ? It's the university's money.

An Aggie is a farmer, right ? Despite the strong link between horses and agriculture some people want an even more obvious one.

What if the mascot were a farmer ? There are lots of stupid-looking matador and gaucho mascots across the country, why not a farmer ?

And to make it a more inclusive choice it could be a FEMALE farmer. Not a non-binary farmer, not a transgender farmer, a female farmer. You could sell it as paying tribute to the contributions of women in agriculture.

Here's the thing that gets lost in the PC garbage-world we live in today. It isn't a crime to identify as a man or a woman. No one is protesting that people have gender. If I may be so blunt at the end of the day the babies get made somehow and there has to be some identification of who has what human reproductive parts at least. They are protesting that people who don't or who do not identify with their birth-assigned gender face discrimination from others and through government institutions intended to serve everyone.

A mascot is a piddly little thing. However, the ridiculous idealists out there have decided that rhetorically defending others by insisting on inclusion in every little thing. Removing gender references is also discrimination in a sense. And really, who are these people who insist an animal mascot can't be male or female ? Can they be removed from society so that know what real discrimination feels like ? Ridiculous.

In San Francisco State's case the mascot was just born out of a pun and what likely was an homage to a famous city landmark. Pretty clever.

Golden Gate(rs)-Golden Gators.

It's not great, but if an incoming freshman is already throwing 88 there's good potential. Control is really more important than velocity. A pitcher with a mid-80's fastball can do OK in Division 1 if he can spot it consistently in places where hitters will make weak contact or miss entirely. If the Aggies get a pitcher out of HS who already throws in the 90's consistently he probably has control issues or else he'd wind up at Irvine, for example.

Of the current Aggies I've seen play in person this year, only games attended, it seemed like Carson Seeman was the best at inducing weak contact. Bryan Green very much looks the part of a future staff ace and professional prospect if he can cut down on the walks.

It's more likely they just took a bunch of common mascot names and put it to a vote. I don't imagine there are too many mafia bosses or wealthy Spanish lords in San Francisco.

They can if they want.

Does UCSF have a mascot ? Maybe the aspiring doctors could put together a softball team with a duck mascot. The UCSF Quacks.