I wouldn't be shocked if a 6-5 UCD gets in by beating either Sac or what appears to be a decent Idaho team. 6-5 UCD vs. 7-4 Idaho might be tough though even if UCD beats them. Neither team would have a bad loss. Idaho has lost to two FBS teams and in this scenario would lose to us and Sac. And while UCD would win the H2H, Idaho would have a much better win by winning at Montana. We really need Sac to beat Idaho next weekend. If Idaho goes 8-3 and wins at Montana and Sac, I don't think it would matter if we beat them and finished 6-5.

6-5 teams have gotten in before. Northern Iowa just did last year though they won at Sac, at South Dakota St and vs. Southern Illinois. And the MVFC did get 6 teams in last year so that wouldn't be unprecedented either.

But yeah, we probably do have to go 7-4 to get in.

Wasn't just a shot to the head. The Sac player was ejected for targeting.

Kicking a FG from the 1 in basically any situation outside of the 4th quarter where it's a game winning/game tying situation is gross and cowardly. I didn't watch so I don't know what happened leading up to that. I just hate kicking from the 1.

Since you mentioned Plough, Boise just fired him. Maybe we can bring him back.

Not totally fair comparing our PPG output this year so far to previous years when we've played an FBS team, a consensus top-5 team an another top-15 team. That's not to say there aren't issues of course. There very well could be. Just that straight ppg isn't a good way to evaluate that yet.

LOL. I didn't want to be too pessimistic with my prediction.

Maybe I should have said SDST by 21+.

South Dakota St by 3 TDs.

Hard to believe a guy that was that dominant for us can't seem to make the NFL. — 88Aggie

He's going from a big fish in a smaller pond to a small fish in a large pond.

Think about it this way. Lets say every team has 8 WRs. There are 32 teams so that's 256 total WRs in the NFL. I know there's practice squad and dudes get hurt but we'll stick with 256. Some of these guys are done after a year or two but plenty stick around for a while. This isn't college where the roster completely turns over every 4-5 years. So there aren't that many jobs open each year. Now let's look at college. There are 124 FBS teams. Lets say for the sake of it that you have 8 WRs per team. It might be more what whatever. The exact numbers don't matter. That's almost 1000 WR's in FBS at any one time. Factoring in redshirt year, lets say 1/5 of those graduate each year so 200. It's probably more since the guys at the top generally aren't staying 4 or 5 years. Obviously they're not all trying to go pro but a lot are. How many open WR positions are there each year? Less than half almost certainly. Is it 1/4? Well that's only 64 spots.

So unless you're highly drafted, there's a couple factors that come into play. Luck is the biggest one. Mainly, do you get the chance to prove yourself. Maybe you go somewhere and a couple guys in front of you get hurt and you perform. Maybe you get lucky and go to the right team where a position coach sees something and makes some sort of tweak that takes you up a level and helps you break through.

At the pro level, all of these dudes are super talented. Different sport but have you heard of Brian Scalabrine? Played 11 years in the NBA and averaged 3.1 ppg for his career and retired in 2012. He told a story about how guys like to challenge him to play 1v1 when he's at the gym because they think they can beat an NBA player. He pretty regularly smokes them because, well, he played in the NBA and they didn't. He said one time a guy was trash talking him and he responded with "I'm closer to being LeBron James than you are to me". It's both an amazing line and true. We see some guy who doesn't play much and think "well he's not that great because he's not playing" when the reality is, he's still really good.

It's tough for Doss because the dude is a stud. But so is every other receiver in the NFL.

I guess you could make that argument. But they could have a $100M budget surplus and if the Big 10 came calling to offer them $50M more, they'd jump in a second. Having a debt is just a convenient coincidence.

Newsom didn't have anything to do with this. If he didn't sign that bill, all those other states mentioned in the article still would have gone ahead and done it anyway. And even if NIL wasn't a thing, all these schools care about is the bottom line. If they can make more money from football by joining a different conference, they don't care about anything else. They're no different from any other sports league or even a large corporation. Money comes first and if making more money aligns with keeping the fans/consumers happy, all the better. If it doesn't align, oh well, F the fans/consumers.

This is the much bigger problem. It's one thing for football to do it for games that are once per week and, generally speaking, on a weekend. I know they travel on a Friday but when I went to school, there were multiple quarters where I didn't have any class on Friday, though this obviously isn't the case everywhere. But what are we doing when there are Thur/Sat basketball games? Now we've got student-athletes (I know it's a cliche but not all these kids are going pro in basketball) missing at least two days worth of classes plus all that time on the plane. It's one thing for UCLA to take the short flight up to Wash/Ore/Utah. It's another going back and forth to the midwest/east coast. And then you've got all the other smaller sports. If this is just football, it's not as big of a deal. But it probably won't be.

Yeah, moving it to the stadium was an awful idea. I mean, it's early June. Odds are, even with good weather, it's going to be 80. And as you said, on that field turf it's going to feel much warmer with the sun beating down on it. You're just asking for something bad to happen. Best case scenario is people are pissed off because they've been baking for a couple hours.

I remember going on a tour of the stadium years ago when it was about to open. Wasn't even that warm that day but you could feel the extra heat off the turf and it was noticeably warmer on it.

Like with most things, there are definitely some negatives that come along with the transfer portal. We just have to evaluate whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Personally, I think they do. But I also understand why some might not be so fond of it or have their doubts about it.

I think the transfer portal will ultimately be a mixed bag.

Yes, there are definitely going to be instances where a small school finds a develops a player only to see them leave. But in a way, isn't that a good thing? If a player is a late developer for whatever reason, isn't it a good thing for them to be able to develop more and a potentially quicker rate? We're trying to benefit the athlete right?

At the same time, there might be more instances where a player is more willing to transfer to a school that is a better fit. There were always a number of athletes willing to transfer anyway while sitting out a year, like Corey Hawkins or Joe Harden. But there might be more now who are willing to if they don't have to sit out a year.

This is a one time thing too, which I like. So the athlete essentially gets a mulligan. Want to transfer a second time? Now you have to sit out a year/burn your redshirt year if you haven't done so already. I like this since it's not like the player is just signing one year deals where they can change schools each year.

So for every program that gets hit because they signed a lightly recruited guy out of high school only to have him blossom and leave, you're going to have another one that benefits from signing guys who didn't pan out at bigger schools. We let coaches sign a bunch of players under (at least partially) the guise of playing for that specific coach only to allow the coach to just leave whenever they want to without sitting out a year. Players should be afforded the same option, at least to some extent.

Adding to the controversy is how players can now get paid for the the use of their NIL (names, images and likeness) which opens the doors for further abuse by 3rd parties and deep pocketed donors getting into the ears of players with promises of more money and stardom from their NIL if they transfer to their school. — BlueGoldAg

This was already happening. It's just more in the open now. I don't think NIL has really changed anything in terms of the big schools.

Relevant to the above,

Over the weekend there was a record-tying 8 wins by double digit seeds.

2-seeds had only 3 losses against 10 seeds since the tourney expanded to 64 teams in 1994 coming into the year. 2-seeds went 0-2 against 10 seeds this year in the tourney.

Could just be a blip of course.

Yeah, I think it's getting better, though that's mainly at the top, but the depth isn't there yet. I imagine it's similar to what the men's tourney would have looked like had there been 64 teams back in the 60's and 70's when UCLA was destroying everyone. Takes time for more and more girls to start playing but eventually, because roster spots are limited, that depth starts trickling down. Doesn't happen overnight though.

There was the 16 over a 1 upset of Stanford but that was due to Stanford losing two players to injuries right before the tournament. Other than that, no 14 or 15 seed has won a game in the women's tourney. By comparison, we see a 14 or a 15 seed win about a game year on average in the men's side. Even in the second round the 1's on the women's side rarely lose (100-3 all time).

Could have been worse for Hawaii.

South Carolina was up on Howard 22-2 after the 1st, 44-4 at half and 60-8 after the third quarter in their first round game.

Stanford shut out Montana State 20-0 in the 1st quarter of their first round game.

Well in Hawkins's case, he had already transferred from Arizona St so he would have been eligible a year earlier for us. Then he would have had to sit out a year had he transferred from UC Davis. I assume he would have been able to use a redshirt year like he did when he transferred from Arizona St. He could have still done that though and might have wanted to if he felt it would help his pro prospects or if he wanted to give a big school another shot. In a world where he doesn't have to sit out a year going from ASU -> UCD, he could have redshirted and still been a junior at his new school.

Shorts is a trickier case. He would have been going into his senior year with only one year at the DI level already. I would guess he would have just stayed at UCD.

It will probably be a mixed bag. For every team it helps it will hurt another team. Smaller schools will lose a guy after a year or two who wants tougher competition but they'll also gain guys who might be less hesitant to transfer from a bigger school they're not playing as much as they'd like to if they don't have to sit out a year.