I was Drunk and talking to myself in the office loudly hahahha so glad you picked up on that hahaha Got to take our episodes with grain of salt. they are Vandal Focused. We could have covered what UC Davis did great, but Vandals that listen want to know what we did bad. Its a very propaganda kinda episode.

haha, all good. It’s fun that you guys do a fan podcast. Good luck at Northern Arizona. I’m thinking you guys handle them, but that elevation factor hurts if you don’t get some of your depth back.

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Does anyone know how many FCS teams are playing this spring? It looks like some of them played a good part of their schedule in the fall.

Good question. I think right at about 100 but I think I heard that quite a while ago. As you note some teams played on the fall (and many of those are not playing in the spring). Examples are Central Arkansas, Campbell and I think a northern Alabama.

I think (but am not positive) that fall games will not be considered in terms of possible playoff seeding

almost all conferences are playing, exceptions are Ivy and MEAC

"I think (but am not positive) that fall games will not be considered in terms of possible playoff seeding"

According to this link:
https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2021-02-09/how-2020-21-fcs-football-season-will-work

"Schools that opted to play games in the fall will have their results considered in the selection process for the spring championship field."

Last figure I heard was 90ish teams are playing. So being Top 25 means being in the top 3rd or 4th of teams or so, which seems like it could be about right for the Ags after Sat

The potential issue with considering fall games is that due to virtually no FCS schools having games, the few that played in the fall (limited schedule) oftentimes played FBS schools (some exclusively, e.g., central Arkansas and Campbell to name a couple- but as most of those who played only FCS are not playing this spring, the cost of going 0-4 against FBS schools becomes moot.

Versus Sports lists 126 FCS teams, but well over two dozen (including Sac State) have not played any games. I'm assuming those schools have cancelled football for this season. Versus also ranks the Aggies at #7. It's an interesting website https://www.versussportssimulator.com/FCS/rankings

Lots of interesting stats and predictions on that website:

https://govandals.com/news/2021/3/8/football-vandals-at-lumberjacks-postponed.aspx

“ The University of Idaho at Northern Arizona University football game scheduled for Saturday, March 13, will be postponed due to COVID protocols within the Vandals' program.”

Darn, hope they didn’t expose any of our guys.

Apparently they had a bunch of guys out for the game with us and now it looks like that was because of Covid concerns. So why didn't they cancel the game against us? Makes me question their Covid protocols...

When the mobile Aggie tailgate visited my house a few weeks ago, i asked about the covid testing requirement for our student athletes. It was very thorough, i believe 3 times per week then before each game. They also offer our testing to opposing teams if the opposing team cant turn the tests over in an expeditious fashion. Maybe the Vandals decided to put their next game on hold until they were full force? I tried to find an updated covid protocol from the Big Sky but couldn't find anything recent.

My guess, and it’s only that, is they had a number of players exposed but that none had tested positive prior to the game.
Once one of those guys test positive then his circle of contacts might have involved more players. I doubt many are infected but they had some exposure and that circle got bigger.

This is depressing;
Saturday's win over Idaho marks the first time UC Davis has beaten a team ranked in the Stats Perform Top 25 (previously STATS, Inc and The Sports Network) since a 22-21 win at Cal Poly on November 13, 2010...
From Weber preview on team site,

Wow. I would have thought Idaho St and Northern Iowa in 2018 but I guess not.

When Hawkins took over after Gould, I was sure that his style of football would enable the occasional upset of better teams.
Defeating a ranked 1AA team didn’t seem like it would be a challenge when we were leaving D2. In 2005, we almost beat New Hampshire which was ranked number 7 just before we beat Stanford. To go through a decade without accomplishing it once seems very strange.

Important to remember that the Gould years were entirely sandwiched in that ten year drought, so that was three years with next to no D1 wins (his first year, different story maybe). It's also just one particular metric you could choose. Hawkins took EWU to their limits twice out of the three times his teams played them. We also had an FBS upset in that that span and had a 1-possession loss to ranked Montana State in 2012.

So really I chalk it up to bad luck that we had zero ranked wins, but it was because of several years of mediocrity that we only had a few opportunities to play ranked teams close. But one better tackle in that EWU quarterfinal or just one more third down conversion in that MSU game might have been enough to get at least one ranked win, it was that close.

My theory is Biggs and staff were pretty good coaches in 2005-2006. I think the GreatWest Conference while offering outstanding competition, was obscure and hurt recruiting; I don’t think we got much of a bump up in recruiting from moving to D1. I think that’s changed now that we are in a higher visibility conference and this team is much more athletic than the 2005 team.
Secondarily, it’s harder than I thought.

perhaps two other factors mixed in were somewhere during the transition were 4 years of championship ineligibility, which probably dampened recruiting and became a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then the economy turned south at just the wrong moment that we probably weren’t funding anything fully when we needed to spool up, including a half-done Aggie stadium. Upward transitions are hard in the west. Sac and Poly have taken 20+ years to have much to show.

Two things that could have changed that? A playmaker and a stud rusher.

Not exactly true - you had James Amos and John Faletoese (as good of DE/DT as we've ever had) and playmakers like Bakari Grant, Chris Carter in the end of the Biggs era.

Something definitely happened to our recruiting in the late 2000s.

To me, the starkest contrasts were:
(1) O Line through 2006 (monsters like the Lekkerkerkers, Elliott Vallejo, Marc Manfredda) that consistently outsized opponents and forced their will, vs. the last Biggs years/Gould era where we were undersized at every position across the line and had no swagger
(2) Clutch play & leadership at QB with guys like JT and Jon Grant (moderate talent but smart, gutsy field generals that stepped up under pressure) vs. talented guys that either got thrown into the fire too early, lacked leadership skills, and/or folded under pressure.

It came down to $$$. The program had a nice bump in buzz when it moved up but was underfunded, understaffed and did not have a real recruiting operation. A lot of the recruits were fringe I-AA quality and much of the staff had become accustomed to playing only trusted upperclassmen. Many of the higher profile guys washed out because they didn't want to wait around for 3 years. These days, a good number of the recruits are fringe G-5 caliber players or better. The program has more money, more to sell, recruits more aggressively and they get the young guys on the field.

Did Biggs go on the road to recruit impact players?

I get the impression we didn't recruit hard in the DII days. It seems we got O'Brien & Benirschke by luck, same for a Biggs stud WR non football player. Wise was skinny?

Not disputing any thing you said. Money was a factor but also we could recruit better as a D2 team with a perennial winning record, than we could as a transition team not eligible for the playoffs, or a team playing in an unknown conference against very good football teams like North Dakota State and South Dakota State etc.. It’s more fun being 9-2 than 6-5 or 5-6. And we didn’t get any more publicity being D1A than we did as D2.

Biggs was a very good recruiter but he didn't have $ for a legit recruiting operation to organize and augment the efforts of the coaching staff. The D2 comp is a little off the mark. Yes, kids like to play for a winner. But more than that, they want a scholarship. The challenge with the transition was moving from an unlimited roster size in D2 to ~105 guys at the FCS level. The D2 program was built on self-motivated kids surviving the process of attrition. That was ultimately a killer with a smaller roster and kids that had a different level of expectation.

I don't remember many "higher profile" recruits washing out during the Biggs D1 years due to lack of early playing time (there weren't that many in the first place). Seems like high-profile recruits washing out was a much bigger issue in the Gould era (when the staff had turned over and there was no D2 mindset favoring older players).

High profile is a relative term but remember that two of the first guys to get scholarship money did not win starting positions and ended up at UCLA.

Accurate that they both left to UCLA, but from my understanding there circumstances outside of playing time.

Who are we talking about?