Great size & established program. Battling EWU & UCLA. Davis closer to home and not the Pac 12 high stakes gamble. Maybe our new athletic performance facility helps ink him. Go Ags!
I've found we landed a 3 star LB commit. They haven't quite made a social media post about it though so when they do I will put it up. Senior season had 100+ tackles, 20+ tackles for loss.
And there it is! Dante Antonini has committed to UC Davis. We ended up being his only D1 offer, but his senior season numbers looked really good. Played safety too, but looks like we landed him as a LB
When a recruit is talking to Big Sky teams and you see a Pac 12 offer on the list, 99% of the time the Pac 12 team has dropped them or never extended a "committable" offer. JRK is a good fit for Davis and would be a nice get. UCLA has not been on him since before the 2021 season.
I think with the portal and extra COVID year, many programs didn’t add as many seniors as normal. Recently they had the all area team for Mercury news. They had profiles on something like 26 Srs and around half had commitments. That seemed low
Seems likely we’re looking at a class about the same size as the 2021 recruiting class. Those 2021 recruits, probably due to the COVID free year given to everyone else, saw little action. However, it was ranked as one of the better recruiting classes in the Big Sky. The running back from Marin Catholic Matteo Perez got some praise early on.
Has anyone heard that any of those recruits looked good in practice?
Filipe Figueroa is from the class of 2019. I’m curious about the really young guys who graduated from HS this spring two recruiting classes later. We signed nine or ten, some with three stars or had interest from a few FBS schools. Very atypical for none of those guys to play other than a few minutes in one sided games. Contrast that with the class of 2020 that had guys playing big roles immediately, like Larison, Hutton, Maae, Buchanan and others.
The player is LB David Hoage. I haven't seen him post anything about entering the transfer portal or anything like that, but both Hawkins and Isaiah Jackson all recently started following him. Like I said, I don't even know if he's in the portal, but with almost 30 players entering there is at least a chance.
I'm really curious regarding the QB situation. There were definitely consistency issues all season. Injuries aside, you never really knew what QB was going to show up in the worst way. I continue to be most intrigued by Tompkins only because you can't teach that level of athleticism. He just needs to find a way to avoid his happy feet on the few passing downs he got.
I won't lie though, I will be a little bit concerned regarding the offense if we roll out the same QB group especially now that we don't have Gilliam, Harrell, Vaughn, etc.
I’ve been a fan of Tompkins, mainly bc of his overall athleticism. But accuracy and reading the defense is not his forte. These are two areas we have desperately missed since Jake graduated. Jake could read the D, call an audible, and turn the down into something. Let’s face it, without a stud qb we likely could be looking at a mediocre season. We could go 0-4 out the gate. Cal, SDSU, Weber, then Montana state. Ouch.
Yep, that's why I will be concerned if we roll out with the same group as last year. None of the top 3 guys feel like complete QBs right now at least, but at least you can coach how to better read a defense. You're not gonna teach a pocket passer to run like Tompkins. Dan isn't a dumb guy and has to know that there are problems, but it seems like recruiting has just gotten harder with the transfer portal and covid years.
I think the younger QBs on the roster Harper and Dixon are likely going to get a look, whereas they didn’t last year. They’ve now been through a couple of camps so maybe they’ve shown something.
I love having Tompkins take some snaps and I’d like to see him expand the envelope of what he does out there, but I don’t think he’s an every down quarterback. He could change my mind with a few completions.
It was interesting hearing Nate Hackett assert a few simple offensive themes. I paraphrase.
'Protect the QB. How do we do that? With a run game and protecting the pocket (QB).... (something about) getting your QB 10,000 reps... off of one play there are countless variations and options, and those reps help a QB to be prepared.'
We've got some weapons, and Lance Babbs coming back would be huge. Cody Hawkins can improve.
Well there's the QB we were wondering about. Michael Ingrassia out of Marin Catholic has committed to UC Davis. Not a lot of offers, but senior season stat line looked decent enough. He completed 64% of his passes for 2700+ yards with 34 touchdowns to only 2 interceptions. He added an additional 600+ yards rushing and 13 touchdowns.