(To sprinkle a little salt on the wound, we lost to a D2 team that dropped its football program at the end of that season.....)

Pac 12 is always looking for wrestling schools. Right now only three full-fledged Pac-12 schools have wrestling teams; Stanford, Arizona State and Oregon State. To reach the minimum of 6 teams for NCAA purposes they've extended affiliate memberships to Cal Poly, CSU-Bakersfield and Arkansas-Little Rock. UC Davis used to be a Pac-12 affiliate in wrestling. I don't think SFSU ever was. They continue to wrestle at the D-2 level as a member (probably affiliate...) of the D-2 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference where they went 0-5 this past year. I can only assume the Pac 12 requires a team to at least compete at the D-1 level to even be an affiliate member in any sport. That makes some sense and would explain why wrestling was the only acknowledged D-1 program at one time.

Cal Baptist is a struggling D-1 wrestling program. They will be wrestling as an affiliate in the Big 12. Good luck to them there. Former UCD head coach Lenny Zalesky just announced his retirement as head coach at CBU. Derek Moore, UCD's only D-1 champion, has been named interim head coach.

(Wouldn't it make more sense for Cal Baptist to wrestle in the Pac 12 and Arkansas-Little Rock in the Big 12?)

Men's water polo, like men's volleyball, does not sponsor different levels of post season play. There is one single tournament. It is, as expected, dominated by the four California Pac 12 schools who compete in the Mountain West Sports Federation as there are not the required six teams and the conference has not seen fit to follow wrestling and offer affiliate memberships to other schools.

The small Southern California Schools, I think all of which are D-3, would send their conference water polo champion to the NCAA's with the expected result. A few years ago they created a post season national D-3 tournament and no longer competed in the NCAA post-season tourney. Not sure it that has survived the pandemic.

I doubt that inviting UCD and SDSU to join the Pac-12 for women's lacrosse is going to be a game changer in the near future. Not sure why the conference invited the schools other than as a courtesy and perhaps a scheduling convenience. You could put the schools in divisions similar to the football divisions with SDSU in a southern division and UCD in a northern one. They also have a history of competing against each other in the MPSF until Arizona State elevated its club lacrosse team to varsity and the conference now had six schools so the schools left the MPSF and established women's lacrosse as a conference sport. That and unlike men's water polo there are not a lot of other D-1 women's lacrosse programs, so UCD and SDSU were alone in the wilderness. There are a lot of men's water polo programs throughout California which are spread out over the Southern California Intercollegiate Conference, the Western Water Polo Ass'n and the Golden Sun Conference.

The Canadian Football League has something called a crossover. The league has nine teams, with five in one division and four in the other. The basic playoff schedule is that the first place teams in each division get a bye and the second place team plays the third place team in it's division in a first round game. At the end of the regular season if the fourth place team in one division has more points in their standings than the third place team in the other division, that fourth place team crosses over and replaces the other team in the playoffs.

There is talk that the Big Ten may tweak it's football championship game to get the top two teams in the game without regard to division alignment. Currently the Big Ten East is stronger than the West. Of course this could lead to Michigan and An Ohio State playing their rivalry game the last weekend of the regular season and then meeting again in the championship game a week later. (That may take a change in NCAA rules, as well.)

Thanks to the Pac-12! After the Pac-12 schools left the MPSF and Fresno State dropped the sport the Aggie and Aztec women were the last two teams in the MPSF. Even the MPSF dropped the sport this past season relegating those two teams to independent status. I'm surprised more colleges don't add women's lacrosse as a Title IX equalizer. It is a fast growing sport in high schools.

And the WAC gets two teams in the NCAA Tournament....Grand Canyon in as a wild card.

And yet at this moment Iowa (36-18) is playing Michigan (30-26) in the final elimination game of the Big Ten Tournament. The winner (probably Michigan the way this is going) will play Rutgers for the conference tournament title this evening. The loser can pack up the equipment for the season. The consensus is that both teams are on the bubble for the NCAA tournament and the bubble will burst for the loser of this game.

(Then again, as a long time Hawkeye fan I could see them making it to the NCAAs only to lose to New Mexico State or some other mid-level conference auto-bid in the first round.)


Post script: A 9 run 7th inning and application of the tournament's 10 run rule will burst the bubble as fast as anything....

A list or at least a link to the poll would be nice. Where are other teams, particularly our opponents, in the view of the soothsayers and fortune tellers who put the poll together?

Game themes and activities are starting to get like minor league baseball or any break in the action at an NBA game.

Pre-season polls, especially three months before the season, are entertaining but that’s about it. Growing up in Iowa I remember when Playboy magazine predicted the Hawkeyes would be number one in the nation with a 9-1 record. (Playboy had articles? Who knew?) They finished 1-9.

Could be a change in policy over the last 20 years also. The "mid-major" conferences kind of need to scratch each others' backs on things like this. Big Sky takes on UCD and Cal Poly in football. Big West picks up Sac in men's soccer and beach volleyball.

Big Sky was a football conference for North Dakota and Southern Utah but all that changed or will by the end of June. IF the Big West were to insist that Sac leave the Big Sky for all it's other sports then we might expect the Big Sky to drop UCD, Cal Poly and Sac from football, which would leave the BIg Sky with a more manageable ten team conference. It would force those schools to look elsewhere, which would probably mean the newly reconstituted WAC...and that would compound our travel issues. Can you say remote corners of Utah and a whole lot of Texas?

Slack State is currently an affiliate member of the Big West in men's soccer and in beach volleyball.

I really don't have a horse, or cow, in this race. Either is fine.

One example of a human agrarian-type mascot would be Herbie Husker at Nebraska...though even Herbie had PC/woke issues recently and his hand signal had to be changed.

The New Mexico State Aggies have a person of sorts, but he looks more like a gunslinger. Isn't brandishing a six-shooter kind of the antithesis of farming?

I googled "cow meaning." That will offend someone soon. As a verb it means bullying. In the UK it is a particularly derisive term for an ill spirited woman. One definition even had person with a large a** and I don't think they were referring to a farmyard animal.

AggieFinn2 - I was aware of the use of Gator as a play on the Golden Gate. Not sure the opening to a large natural bay/harbor, or the bridge that spans it, is much of an inspiring mascot either but you don't want to name your teams after Coit Tower either.

Still better than the Boll Weevils of Arkansas-Monticello. Who names their teams after a pest? And while Delta State's teams are called the Statesmen, (or the somewhat oxymoronic Lady Statemen) they are more colloquially called Fighting Okra. A team named after soul food?

Perhaps we could follow the culinary theme, and in honor of our renowned viticulture and enology program call our teams the Fighting Gamay Beaujolais.

Or have another student referendum to select a varietal.

I thought I'd read some years ago that UCSF had a few club teams that would play other schools, but I cannot find anything to confirm that. Funny about my memory, eh?

Probably aren't a lot of Gators in the City either, Golden or otherwise....but we sheepishly need to acknowledge the Urban Knights of the Academy of Art.

While wasting my time looking up Aggie and bovine nicknames and mascots I learned that in 1907 the student body at Williams College voted to have the school's mascot be a purple cow. The teams are called the "Ephs," after college founder Ephraim Williams. Hard to visualize an "Eph."

And the mascot of the Texas A&M Aggies is a collie dog. The Utah State Aggies mascot is a generic bovine that looks like a longhorn.

We are from a University system with Anteaters and Banana Slugs.

Ags actually took the series against the Tritons.

"Also- no “d” in Henrickson."

Someone should tell Joe Avison.

Sac won both sides of the Causeway Cup track meet, the Hornet men defeating the Ags 95-79 and the women out scoring their Aggie counterparts 106-81. With that the unofficial 2021-22 Causeway Cup comes to a close, the Aggies winning the overall competition 50-35.

(Don't tell anybody, but if this was scored by the original rules where football, volleyball and both basketball games were scored as 10 points, and if there was baseball this year and Sac won, the final score would be 55-55.)

Having nothing to do with FSC or HBCU schools, BYU just backed out of a late season 2023 game against USC and USC went to it's emergency back up school and scheduled San Jose State for their 2023 opener.

Wonder if USC will eventually schedule FCS.. One of the reasons SC alum opposed the game against UCD was that there were three FBS schools that had never played FCS....USC, and USC's biggest rivals, UCLA and Notre Dame and the USC folks didn't want to hear it from their rivals.

A good day for the Aggies as they defeated Sac in beach volleyball, 4-1, in the morning and then in women's tennis, 4-0, in the afternoon.
If the schools recognized a Causeway Cup this year the running score would now be UCD 50, CSUS 25. That means that even if the schools had competed in baseball, and CSUS had won, the Ags would still have won the overall Cup competition.
The final events between the schools this year are the Causeway Cup Duals in track & field to be held at Sac this coming Friday the 29th.

Go Ags!

Aggie men's golf team finished 6th of 14 teams at their own El Macero Classic with 865 strokes. Sac had 871 strokes to finish in a tie for 8th. Thursday proved to be the difference as the Ags shot 282 to Sac's 297. Running score for the phantom 2021-22 Causeway Cup is now UCD 42.5, CSUS 25. Next up are women's tennis and the second of two beach volleyball meetings, both tomorrow at Davis. With only 17 sports this year the Ags have assured at least a tie in this year's unofficial Causeway competition

This is a VERY YOUNG team. Four of the five golfers that competed in the BW championships are true freshmen (freshwomen?). (One of them is from Kyiv, Ukraine. Imagine what she is going through....) https://ucdavisaggies.com/sports/womens-golf/roster

During the season the website listed seven golfers. Not sure why only five are listed now....the other two were a sophomore and a redshirt sophomore.