I'm seriously wondering if the CFP committee will take disease into account now.

I would not blame the coaching staff at all if they cancelled practices up until the home opener. Even if not it's hard to imagine SDSU at full strength Week 1 and that may roll over to the next game vs ASU.

I see it now: half the team gets infected, we lose to Davis, ASU, and Stanford, then recover and win out the rest of the schedule but miss NY6 and playoffs, and ESPN makes a 30-for-30 out of it.

True to an extent I think, though it hasn't seemed to concern coaches or pundits much.

I'm not sure if it's because they're confident in the unit's depth, planning to lean more on Chapman to make plays happen under pressure, or just hiding weaknesses though.

Sac Republic has done an incredible job with their branding and ticket sales (#2 attended minor league team in the US; sold out all but like 2 games in club history) so this might be a huge catch for the Ags if this guy had something to do with all that.

Their image and outreach is super slick as well -- for example they used reddit and an April Fool's joke to test the waters on a Quail mascot and then when people started liking it quietly let it become the unofficial team name. In all seriousness I can't think of a better pro team example for UCD to follow.

Edit: I see from his Linkedin that he also was the ticket sales guy at the Rivercats, the A's, and the Sharks. This sounds like a serious catch.

There could be some interesting options on the table with Spencer being a short-yardage wildcat QB, even if he doesn't get the starting job. I seem to recall he ran the Wing T or some other option offense in high school.

To elaborate on SDSU a bit...

Penny is a beast. Even last year we knew that he might eclipse Pumphrey as an NFL prospect, and that was largely through kick returns and getting carries in between Pumphrey's turns. However calling him a backup, while technically true, doesn't really capture how many carries he got with the first string.

SDSU runs a successful version of what Gould wanted the Aggie offense to be. Chapman (QB) is a game manager who only needs to throw 8-15 passes a game and can scramble when he has to. He has some decent targets who might provide matchup trouble for FCS CBs but really they're mostly there to keep the defense honest. Last year, FCS New Hampshire actually actually had one of the best defensive performances against our run game but that was because they were stacking the box. Eventually a frustrated Long ditched the original game plan and started airing it out to just press the FBS speed advantage.

The good news is that that State won't be looking or even able to run up the score necessarily and a stop every other drive might be enough to keep the game close in the first half, depending on how Hawk's new offense performs. The Ags have to sustain drives though because otherwise SDSU will chew the clock like crazy. The other good news is that a lot of the Gould recruits have a ton of practice with a similar offense so the practice squad is probably on point.

Sucks to hear about the pox; I hope those guys have a speedy recovery. I've been told chicken pox is worse as an adult than as a kid when most people used to get it.

I panicked when I first read the news because I'm starting work as an SDSU Athletics tutor in two weeks, but then remembered that vaccines exist. I wonder how many of the players haven't been vaccinated; and if it's that common to not be these days.

The travesty of this video was that it's been out for weeks, just unlisted on Youtube. (Somebody on reddit found the link.)

ICA had an amazing thing on their hands and it didn't occur to them to make it public, looks like.

Did it look like CJ regressed from last year or was he just overshadowed by the other QBs in the lineup?

I think the KGB Skyshow is always on the first game of the year, which means that SDSU might be the only FBS team to have a higher average attendance for FCS matchups than other FBS matchups.

Last year the listed attendance was 46,400 for the New Hampshire game (though many showed up late, just for the fireworks). Factor in the increased ticket sales we apparently have from the Chargers leaving and the fact that UC Davis is local, famous, and has a riled up alumni community, and we could be looking at 55k.

Hopefully they do something creative with post-Chargers Qualcomm to make it seam less cavernously empty. And less blue-and-gold themed, considering Davis is our first matchup.

If Cal wants to hire a Big West coach, I would guess Turner would be preferred as he's had more consistent success these past few years.

Here's hoping it's not Les.

I've been thinking this before -- and winning with Bertsch scoring zero made me ponder it again -- I wonder if Coach Gross would ever consider a strategic redshirt on one of the current juniors in order to try to extend the success to a third year?

Like if you redshirt say Rachel Nagel then you still get 4 of the 5 starters back next year -- more than any team can reasonably hope for in a given year -- and then you get 3 of the current 5 starters back the year after.

The flip side is that it weakens next year's possible tournament run in exchange for a higher seed the following year. I don't know which one is better in the long run.

I feel bad about saying this, especially after Friday, but if there was ever a time to run up the score it would be at WSU's house. The committee screwed up and I hope the Ags can make them painfully aware of it.

That said, wins are wins! Great job Aggies in surviving a tough out!

Normally I do think that the women can get the short end of the stick when it comes to recognition -- considering they outperform the men a lot of the time -- but I have give a bit of a pass to the media this year.

Remember, this all happened in a whirlwind. 10 days ago I would not have guessed that the women would bow out in their first BWCT game and the men would go on to win a NCAAT game. Campus PR and local media had to quickly gear up for the biggest flux of interest the university has seen in years and it's not surprising that something fell through the cracks.

Hopefully some of the excitement and attention carries over to their WNIT run. They're a very strong team and while I don't know much about the competition I think CSU at least is quite beatable.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=uc%20davis

Search volume for "uc davis" on Google is the highest it's been since you-know-what. It was already on the upswing due to admissions letters on Friday but when this is all said and done it'll be a clear local maximum.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The amount and type of ESPN games are determined by the conference's TV deal, and that's not going to change just because one team won a play-in game.

There's like 2-5 ESPNU games and a single ESPN2 game to be distributed among the all teams. We get priority for those games because we're not part of the Socal ESPN3/Fox deal, but even then that's just one or two broadcasts per year. I think we just penciled ourselves in for next year but that's the most we could hope for on the national scale for now.

More doable, maybe, is to improve our Big West TV broadcasts and get them on local TV like some BWC schools do. It would be great to get on Comcast Sports Net but if not maybe a local Sacramento station like Sacramento Republic does.

I think NCAA recommends an even split. It's a way to enforce parity so that the best teams in the power conferences who make the tournament each year (like, well, Kansas) don't hoard all the resources from their bottomfeeders. I haven't seen anything from the Big West forums to suggest our conference breaks from the recommendations.

20k/year isn't much on its own, but remember we're still getting payouts from Cal Poly's win and Hawaii's win. That's 60k a year, which is funding for a full scholarship or an assistant's salary. If the Big West can consistently win play-ins or pull off middling upsets then that actually starts to make a difference.

According to 538, predictive statistics show a 1-seed really should have lost by now -- and essentially they have, in the sense that several games were so close that they were decided by luck. There's still tremendous odds against any particular 16-seed making the upset, but it's fair to guess that it will happen at some point. So no reason to feel hopeless (yet).

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-no-16-seed-will-win-but-dont-bet-on-it/

My research led me to believe it's paid over 6 years, with 1.6M being an estimate including expected growth in payouts. Divide it 9 ways and you get our average annual payout, not counting for inflation.

No idea where it goes; I think it would be fair for bball to get it but who knows.

I'm not so sure about the town being the biggest initial draw. Some people outside of Norcal actually do think Davis is in the middle of nowhere. Additionally I don't have the numbers but I suspect that the share of our applicant pool coming from cities will grow due to economic and population trends.

I think it's more of a "come for the connections and prestige; stay for the wonderful town" thing. There might be some merit to portraying UCD as a hip, connected campus near an up-and-coming city and letting students fall in love with the town when they visit or enroll.

I think that while critics of the play-in game are trying to be empathetic towards low-majors, at the end of the day they're still stuck approaching it from a power-school perspective. Just getting to play in a game that's nominally part of "March Madness" is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for some schools. Winning any game, whether against a 16 or a 1, doubles the revenue some conferences get from the tournament.

Or to look at it another way, UC Davis is ranked in the 100-200 range by pretty much any system. Getting a bid to a tourney supposedly representing the 68 best teams in the country is definitely not an unfair slight against us. I would go so far to say that the tournament's setup with automatic bids and play-in games is very fair to the low-majors -- the folks who should feel slighted are the Wichita States and Illinois States out there, who get underseeded or ignored in favor of middling p5 teams.