Any news at all about our team? Real radio silence. Are they putting in the wishbone?
So far all I have seen has been mentioned on this board. Usually we would have some position reviews other than the linebacker article in the Enterprise. I hope they put out a depth chart in the game notes

Based on comparative scores last year (Sagarin) we’d have been favored by ten. This starting rating this year in that rating system has us the underdogs by about 4. Based on what I don’t know, And we’ve had competitive games with them in the past. So I don’t think a blowout is likely.
We’re the more settled team so should be better in the first game of the season, 1st game, proven passing combinations mostly veteran line should put some points up on a team that is still figuring things out. If we get a good game from defense we should win.

I wonder what they could possibly know about our team? I haven’t seen any coverage in 10 days. Except for the happy news that we’ve had guys transfer to UCLA and ASU and win scholarships.
So it’s going to surprise them that we have a team at all.

Really the defense allowed a pretty high percentage of pass completions and the offense was heavily weighted to throwing, so I don’t think their performance was that significant. All we can take from this is they still are playing a bunch of people at QB and elsewhere

Kelley going start at UCLA. Painful to read

https://www.dailynews.com/2018/08/18/joshua-kelley-makes-an-impression-with-ucla-football/

Wasnt thinking about defensive linemen yet, butI hope the new guy is good. I suspect he’ll lose weight.

The article had examples where they recruit guys with the frame to add weight and then they get bigger lifting, or so they say.
In the article they have a guy who was 240 ending up at 350. We tend to have guys gain maybe 10 or 15 lbs.
What does that mean? Who knows?
Maybe our guys are the right size for what we do, maybe not.
Cal Polys coach Walsh says something along the lines of bigger guys are better at horizontal blocking than vertical. It seems to me that big heavy lines tend to be better at pass blocking than run blocking, maybe related to what Walsh says. In the olden days linemen got downfield to block and they had pulling guards etc which required more mobility. Pass blocking requires that the lineman mostly stays on his feet and is hard to move so being big is advantageous. Walsh says run blocking has changed and is less vertical as well,

It seems unusual for us to have players get more than moderately bigger during their career here, going by roster weight. We have one guy, Colton Lamson, whose gained 50lbs in comparison to 2017, but he’s the exception. We aren’t small on the offensive line but we don’t have guys who are 310+. Not saying that’s good or bad, just different

Kelly and Hoyt, two players who had scholarships here plus guarantee playing time left to walk on at a Pac12 school. Plus the guy from 2006 whose name escapes me.
Make it so they don’t have to sit out and we might lose more, Not a bad thing if there is a two way flow but there hasn’t been.

We deserve this wish.....We don’t have to be world class in running the ball, just good enough so that running in typical running situations is not precluded. It would make all aspects of offense better.

We lost a linebacker or defensive lineman to UCLA the year after the win over Stanford. I guess he felt he was as good as those guys and left. He played some at UCLA

I don’t think the redshirt rule is for flexibility although it provides that. The motivation for the two rules is probably to foster parity by allowing transfers from overstocked schools to less loaded rosters. The less loaded rosters will also get more games out of the players they have. Hopefully the big name schools will not attract tranfers in a Golden State Warriors manner. Will be good if players transfer to where they can get playing time and not good if they transfer to where they can be a backup on a big name school. Wouldn’t surprise me if they cut roster size down the road. They effectively made rosters bigger due to longer eligibility.

The unanticipated history at Davis seems to be that we have more of our talented players transferring to FBS schools than transfer down to us, The transfer rule might make that worse. We’ve had players on scholarship leave us to walk on at UCLA and Arizona State. Defensive lineman Jordan Hoyt just earned a full scholarship at ASU.

Allowing redshirts to play will be a bigger factor in FCS than FBS due to their smaller rosters and number of scholarships. Law of diminishing returns would indicate that adding more depth will help a team with 60 scholarships more than one with 80

on offense we need to be more effective in the ground. We need to be able to pick up first downs on third and three by running the ball. I know we expect Tehran to be a factor with that but we are also needing to replace two offensive linemen and we have some good young big lineman who may improve our run blocking. This will help inside the twenty at both ends of the field. I remember one play I think against Weber where we had third and short deep in our end, threw to Doss along the sideline where he was double covered and it was incomplete. Short punt followed, resulting in short drive for TD. On third and one or two we have to be confident we can get it.

So far this year we’ve had the enterprise cover one position. At this rate we’ll have the whole team analyzed by Halloween

is the Blue Force the defensive side of the team? I believe they will rise to the occasion. We’ll have a really good idea after the first two games.

I can see it both ways. Lots of challenging games can fall either way. Optimistically our skilled offensive players give us an edge.

Finally an optimistic opinion about our schedule..
We can win 2 of our out of conference get ranked and we don’t have to play the two Utah schools who shared eague title

Yep, the 6’7” guy is tight end size maybe he blocks as well. The 6’5” guys bio seems like a good athlete. But we’re deep at receiver. Hope coaches can finds role if they have ability. We need to wait and see how things sort out, might see some surprises.