Others in coach’s circle may have some ideas on what is joyous and millions of dollars seems to appeal to people. Nothing scares Mrak more than a football coaching search. The last two games of the season do not set up well for the Ags. The best outcome for joyfinding would be to leverage this success into real institutional support for football (donors, in game experience, travel and road experience, baseline nil, natural turf, increase staff budget). Ultimately this is Gary’s call and he needs to make a decision as to whether he wants to build a legacy or turn this place into a commuter campus.

The rules aren’t enforced. Everyone in the P4 and G5 has a dedicated staff to evaluate targets and entice them into the portal. You go through the high school coaches and 7x7 programs.

Sad but this is the reality. Bains had like 15 tackles at FSU yesterday and Caden is going to get some big offers. Likely already has.

The interest in Plough will be at least in part due to the idea that he’d bring Caden in the deal.

Psyk has been effective but that’s about it. The other side has been a major struggle. The top three tacklers right now are safeties. Hard to blame those guys for busted coverage when they’re making up for the linebackers in the run game and there’s no pressure outside of one guy.

There are only 8500 or so seats and the student section is a big chunk of that.

Sievers played well. He’s improving each week. 8 is still struggling and gets lost in traffic. Schematically the defense is set up for him to be the tackling machine and that’s not happening. Rough week for 31 also. He’s such a pest when he can chase from the back side but teams are going right at him and having a hard time disengaging.

Great work, again.

It is a hard job. No question. That doesn’t mean you are obligated to make dumb decisions. Lan covering kicks is dumb. Perez getting the ball most of last year instead of fisher was dumb. Promising a starting lb spot to a backup TE from Cal was dumb. These things add up.

Because the hc is in way over his head.

You sir are correct.

Too much size is not the problem at LB…8 is not real good diagnosing and 31 at edge just gets dominated against the run when he’s on the play side. Expect to see a heavy dose of power until the Ags show they can line up and make some basic run fits. 9 last year cleaned a lot of things up.

I think it looks great. Nice job getting that done.

Consider there are about 8,500 seats at the stadium plus room for 2k or so in the end zones. The reported number sounds like something we would hear from across the causeway.

Right. But they don’t currently have demand for either 2,000 additional paying spectators or 20 suite tenants. The difference is the seats currently exist for 2,000 people that might be willing to buy tickets. The suites do not currently exist and will cost many millions of dollars versus a revenue stream of a couple hundred grand. The real trick is getting one group of donors to fund the stadium expansion and suites and another group to lease the space. They should be trying to cultivate both audiences.

20 x 10k would take decades to pay back the capital costs. SLO has 20 person suites in the 20k/year range.

There are 3 main categories: University partners (think Pepsi, Sodexo), football/athletic sponsors, and donors/fans. Davis has lots of parters in the first category but the central campus leadership has never leaned on this group to really jump in to athletics. Davis has very few of the second and third category that have expressed willingness to contribute the 25 to 50k that would be the going rate for suites. Montana has some cheap old boxes that aren’t terribly expensive. Davis will not be able to replicate that unless they want to tilt up some tents in one of the end zones.

I don’t see the parallels for Davis. Strange the South Dakota trip was enlightening when they’re in SLO every other year which has had the suite situation dialed in since the Spanos side opened up.

Those have been at the tennis center for a number of years. They don’t really make sense there but neither does much else on campus.

These are never apples to apples. Some schools report facility amortization as part of operating expenses while others don’t. In most places there are football costs allocated to the AD rather than to football specifically, which I suspect is the case with the Dakota schools.