Looks like slight chance of precipitation in SLO but not much. When I saw the dreary weather in the SLO pictures on the football team's Instagram I got instinctively scared, but honestly UCD is so run-heavy that rain might benefit the Ags more than Cal Poly. Still getting used to thinking of them as anything other than a pure option team

There's no Cal Davis logo in the rotation. Script Davis is probably the closest we have to that but it's always stand-alone in that form

Though I understand Daft is not entirely to blame for the offense under Gould, I don't think it should be forgotten that he was a key staff member, arguably THE key one after the HC himself, during the objectively worst stretch of UC Davis football history in decades. And where we were particularly plagued by utterly predictable and stale playcalling and bad clock management.

It looks like he's rebounded and found a good gig at Dartmouth, and if that leads to an HC job there or a bigger OC job elsewhere that's great and he can continue to spread Aggie Pride and Sochor's legacy there. But building a winning culture at Davis means that our AD has to emphasize that performance matters when hiring and especially re-hiring people, so I'm hoping that Daft makes his way elsewhere for a few years. I don't feel bad saying this because it doesn't look like he'll be short on work anytime soon.

I'm convinced that the tilted block UC DAVIS is purely designed to be visible from a distance/on TV/ on a small screen and was not chosen for actual aesthetics. It does succeed on that front

Agreed. I have a hard time mustering up a defense of a celebrity doing something that would get the average worker fired/disciplined/shunned in their workplace, and I think using slurs to talk about members of your organization and sharing topless photos of coworkers in documented conversations to a supervisor would qualify.

And ignoring the morality of the above (not that one should), it's a serious lapse of judgement when you're paid millions in the spotlight to do anything but maintain a squeaky clean record when you're talking to people in the organization. Based on the kind of person Gruden seems to be in private and his judgement calls, I personally wouldn't want him to work for me if I had the choice, nor would I think him qualified to be a leader on the field and in the community based on that either.

Edit: Changed to "a supervisor" to reflect that it wasn't his team's owner. Point still stands that technically all of the NFL is the same organization, especially since some of the slurs were directed at the commissioner himself

I think the difference is that in 2018 the team passed the "eye test" with soaring colors in every game but EWU. Yeah most of our points against Stanford were at the very end but we kept it competitive for three quarters. Our offense basically scored at will vs SJSU.

And even though Montana wasn't doing that hot, what the Ags did in Wa-Griz was unprecedented, so I think anybody following that box score basically counted it as a quality win

It must be good for team morale that even the 4th-string guy in the game's most visible position practices for moments where he'll be counted on for key plays. (Also since there were 9 linemen in on the Gunnor Package I imagine some of those guys don't get much playing time, on offense anyway)

Yeah, it's pretty clear in retrospect now that Hastings and Tompkins at minimum could ahve moved the ball against a tired Dixie State.

Just noticed a peculiarity that I didn't pick up on before in the Idaho game video Finn linked before; right at the beginning of the 2nd quarter Faulk takes a snap under center as part of a super-short-yardage package that I can't recall seeing before. (Marsh mistakenly said it was Hastings, I actually forgive that one because the 4 and 7 can be confused and it was only for one play.)

Something deeply amuses me about the notion that Hawk apparenly has a chart of distances and at least two different gadget QBs that go in based exactly how close the line to gain is

I seem to remember GF came in as essentially a wildcat QB late in the San Diego game -- he just immediately rushed up the middle after the snap a few times. Then his helmet came off and TT had to come back in

ESPN says two rushes for 4 yards this season

https://www.espn.com/college-football/team/stats/_/id/302

Aggies' overall stats are pretty funny going into this week. Barring injuries at least 3 guys with a TD pass this year are going to to get PT against Idaho State. Crawford's QB rating is comical at 665.

I thought opponents' media was overhyping our rushing attack a bit but they're really not, every UCD rusher who's likely to actually see the field in a close game is averaging over 4 ypc. And this is after stats were brought back to earth vs Weber and Idaho's defenses.

My understanding is that Tunein tries to paywall some college games and possibly the Aggies'.

Learfield apparently created its own radio app for associated schools in response, but I've never tried it: https://thevarsitynetwork.com/audioapplink

Yeah that's a good point about the disruption, it did seem to me like the Ags just weren't getting much contact behind the LOS or getting many hands on the ball itself during pass D.

My seats this year don't have a very good angle and I always forget to look at the board, were we stacking the box a lot after the first couple of Idaho drives? It seems to me there just weren't enough blue shirts to go around against those short/mid passes

In our actual meaningful (Weeks 1, 4, 5) games we've been giving up 17 a game which is pretty serviceable since that includes a ton of turnovers that either iced games or put the offense in great position. In comparison to previous years this seems very serviceable when complementing an offense who should be able to score three TDs.

Because of the seeming bend-don't break mentality and the offense being basically designed to lose the ToP battle I think there's some psychological effects at play where the defense looks somewhat worse than it actually is. Other teams are racking up yards but not able to capitalize (and partly they're just starting in bad field position and have a lot of territory available to cover because our punting is phenomenal).

As usual they have some pretty informative analysis.

Some highlights are they view their Wildcat QB as their version of TT but they're frustrated that he never throws, and that they were concerned about defensive stamina because this was the first four-quarter game they played. Also, they give a lot of props for Hawkins winning the coaching battle with the late QB switch and on D forcing Idaho to keep passes quick and short at the end

I read through the lines and thought that the 10K capacity limit was only ever a mechanism to fall under less restrictive county rules for vaccine requirements. Since UCD is now claiming compliance with Yolo's policies for 10K+ events as I understand it, then they may have decided to quietly raise the capacity and open up more seats.

That being said, it didn't look like 11.6K. I would have guessed a healthy 9K crowd or so

The current live horse is Sugar actually lol

And I'd add Pint to the list of mascots too, he's been a staple for almost a decade now

she may have inherited the hat ("Maggie" was already a fourth year when she joined the increasingly confusing family of mascots in 2019)

I was looking forward to their breakdown, their before and after shows were pretty fun last year

I'm not sure about Abilene but the Weber ranking makes sense within the framework of that methodology. Most teams would be 1-3 against Weber's schedule as of this point.

This is a ranking of how well teams can "steal" wins, the way I see it. It doesn't value the games you're supposed to win and certainly not the margin of victory, but it does care a lot about upsets.I guess you could argue this is ranking luck to some degree as well.

By a significant margin too.

Looks like that ranking attempts to determine the likeliness of an average FCS team getting the same results as each team. So in other words, that algorithm doesn't expect any other teams to go 4-0 on our schedule. My specific guess would be it's overweighting the Tulsa game (which it assumes most FCS teams would lose, or be unlikely to win while also beating Weber) because it can't account for the players getting suspending or a wild goal-line fumble saving the game.