Certainly looking like a who has the ball last wins situation.

Sac in a bit of trouble. Down 28-17 at half.

Correct. I'm fine with the current rule of giving the players the ability to transfer once without the penalty of losing a year of eligibility. I was just giving what I thought was a more fair alternative to how the rules used to be.

I've never thought it was fair that a coach can spend all this time recruiting kids to the school/program but they can just up and leave for the next job without sitting out a year while the kids, some of whom came to play for that coach, would be forced to sit out a year if they want to transfer.

Maybe that means you make the rule that if a coach leaves, the players can then leave without sitting out a year. Even that would be much better than the system we had a few years ago.

Also noticed that of the 8 teams left, 2 are undefeated and 5 have 1 loss.

The only team with 2 losses? North Dakota St.

They're lucky the game is on Friday. Saturday it would have been awful weather with both rain and a 20 mph wind.

Weirdly three of the four playoff games are on Friday this week.

Incarnate Word’s only loss was by 6 on the road to SE Louisiana, who won their first round playoff game. Hammered a 5-6 Southern Illinois team and also won at Nevada (they went 2-10 but it’s still an FBS win). Scored at least 31 in every game this year and over 40 in 9 of their 12 games.

Definitely cost us the win too.

Only 3. Sac, Montana St and SDSt.

All 7 home teams have won so far. Sac the last one left.

Looks like NDSt let Montana hang around for a while but then took control. A nice crockpotting. Just ran it down their throat with 40 rushes for 455 yards. Only 58 passing yards.

It's definitely up there as far as worst moves. Because they're stuck with him for a few years due to the dead cap money if they cut him. I don't know exactly how it works but if you cut a player, sometimes there's money left on the contract that goes to the salary cap for the next season. I believe the record dead cap hit is $40.5M for Matt Ryan this year with Atlanta. The league salary cap this year is $208M. If Denver cuts Wilson after this year, they'd have a dead cap hit of $107M in 2023. If they cut him after the 2023 season, they'd have a dead cap hit of $85M in 2024. After the 2024 season and it would be $49.6M for the 2025 season.

Then, like you said, there are the draft picks. They gave up the 9th overall pick in 2022, a 2022 2nd round and a 2022 5th rounder. They also owe a 2023 1st rounder (which should be in the top-10 and could be top-5) plus a 2023 2nd rounder.

One theory I've heard is that Wilson pretty much doesn't run anymore. And if you don't have to worry about a mobile quarterback running, it makes them easier to defend. He'd averaged at least 21 rushing ypg in 8 of his first 9 seasons. Last year he was at 13.1 and this year he's at 13.7. He's always been a good passer but he was never Tom Brady. He used his legs to buy more time before throwing. And teams had to be wary of his running. So if he's not running anymore, that means teams can drop an extra guy into coverage, which will make it harder to find open receivers.

Not trying to defend Hackett because it seems like he's done a poor job, but Russell Wilson is not good anymore and it's hard to win in this league without a good QB. Wilson has 8 TD passes in 10 games. That's not all on the head coach and the playcalling.

Things I'm hoping for next weekend:

Montana to lose by 40.
Sac St to lose.

I'm basing this purely off the schedule but Sac's game doesn't appear to be easy. They face Richmond who lost to FBS Virginia, #5 William and Mary by 11 and Elon (1st round playoff loser) by 3 in 2 OT. They also beat New Hampshire at home and Delaware on the road, both of whom won their first round playoff games.

"Truax [Bucknell AD] provided several reasons for UM’s inclusion ... challenged themselves in cross-conference matchups. — movielover

Boy they sure did challenge themselves when their three cross-conference opponents had a combined record of 9-24. You know who actually did challenge themselves? UC-effing-Davis. One of our non-conference opponents single handedly had more wins than all three of Montana's combined.

“UC Davis made a late push to get in there … and while they showed well, they only finished with six D-I wins … every other team we were talking about had seven.” — movielover

If only we had the ability to look a bit beyond just the record of the teams in question. If only we could, say, look at head to head results or the quality of opponents the teams played. If we could do that, we'd realize that despite Idaho having a better record than UC Davis, Idaho not only got their ass kicked at home by UC Davis but complied that superior record while playing a weaker schedule.

These idiots have no good reason to have left us out other than "well, they went 6-5 which is worse than 7-4 therefore we must not consider them". It's beyond awful. Like we’re not even asking them to pick between a team from the Big Sky, the MVFC and the CAA where they might not even have any common opponents. These are three teams from the same conference where we have a ton of data points to evaluate.

I thought two days later I was mostly over this and had moved on to the World Cup but nope. Clearly this would hasn’t healed yet.

They've obviously been better than us the last three full season but we literally almost beat them this year. It's not like Taylor came in and they're all of a sudden beating us by 30 every year. We were up 17-3 in the second quarter and 17-13 entering the 4th quarter in 2019 too. It's hilarious to say we'll never beat them under Taylor. I mean, it could obviously happen. The dude could leave the program in the next month in which case we wouldn't get a chance to beat him.

If Montana was outside the top 25 coming into the season no chance they make it. — CK2

I mentioned this in a different thread but this is a huge part of it. It happens at the FBS level too. Teams that lose don't always drop enough and teams that win don't jump enough. Case in point, we beat Idaho a week ago by 18 at their place. They were 15, we were unranked. Both had 6-4 records after the game. The next rankings come out and they're 2 spots ahead of us.

Wasting a really good Denver defense this year too. If Denver had scored 18 points in regulation in every game, they’d be 9-1 right now.

To some extent it probably was. But make it Idaho instead of Montana. They beat Montana but avoided Montana St and Weber. Plus we beat them by 18 at their place. If we had Idaho’s schedule, we go 8-3 or 7-4 (Montana game being the tossup). If they had our schedule, they go 5-6. So they’re giving Idaho the nod due to luck of the draw. We can do better than that.

Can’t complain about missing the playoffs because we conclusively proved we are unlikely to win a game against ranked competition, doing so once in five opportunities — Riveraggie

We can complain because Montana even more conclusively proved that they’re unlikely to win a game against ranked competition and they got in.

My thoughts also on the schedule. No Montana St or Idaho. Would be really nice to win either the Montana or Weber games. Would give us a little leeway.