I am getting very dizzy. I have gone around the circle on MBB over lights and coaching and the BWC and the poor seasons of play we have had the past few years more than I choose to recall. But this development pretty much seals the deal for me. I do not care what the final outcome of this potential debacle is, whether it’s a small IX issue, weed in the dugout, or some larger thing that I don’t care to imagine, I think UC Davis MBB is gone, cooked like a goose, disrespected and dead. Not any more UC Davis MBB seasons in our lifetimes. The mind is boggled by this development. Did Blue know and leave? What about the faculty rep that I so recently praised, did he know and do nothing? Matt Vaughn? Once the respected alum and beloved coach, what in heavens name happens to him? Not a happy week in Rocko or Chancellor May’s land this week. Bee will chew on this for the rest of the year: “Hey, this might be better than Katehi, Ha, Ha. . . . . .” Stay tuned, won’t be good.

I guess we have to put the lights on hold. Bad thing. But we now don’t have to worry about firing the coach or hiring a new coach. Good thing. Probably not a bad idea to have the faculty athletics rep having a son on the BB team. Can’t very well lie to Dad can you. . . For long. Feel bad that Rocko inherited this thing.

OK, we can pass on third down. TT can do that as well. As I reported before, according to the WP statistical study of the effectiveness of passing the football. We have: UG for three. Larison for three. 3rd and 3 is about is good as it gets for a completion percentage or by a run by TT. Who would you rather have with the ball? Thanks agalum, great post.

I am fast becoming a Woody Hayes devotee. Remember “three things happen when you pass the ball: two are bad.” I am looking forward to a successful season of “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Well, lets just say a cloud of rubber chips, but thats OK. My bet is TT starts the first game. UG and Larison behind him. Really looking forward to this season!

NC it is always hard when you have a very good QB (HR) and a potentially great QB (Tompkins) and a coach has to choose between the two. I think Hawk had to give HR the ball this year due to his being the only QB with any experience this year. But as the season wore on we got to see more and more of what TT could do on the field and it was an awesome performance. With TT, UG and Larison in the backfield I see that as a very formidable and powerful group of athletes. So I see a more run oriented team this coming season which I for one see as great!

I do not see the Aggies cutting BB for a number of reasons. Number one, eliminating $150,000++ in coaching salary is a drop in bucket even in a lean budget year; it is minuscule in the overall UCD athletic budget; Number two, not smart to cut a sport that has potentially the best BB infrastructure in the BW. It just has to be finished- Lights, for a start! Davis night BB is an automatic draw when the temp is 104 in the day. Number three, I believe Rocko is an perpetually optimistic AD. He is a great fund raiser and outreach guy. Cutting a major sport is not on his playlist. Number four, Scott Carroll, faculty athletic rep is not just your bored old faculty guy with an easy assignment, he is an activist, former college athlete and he has sons who play BB. One is on the present UCD team. Probably our best pitcher. His other son is on the Sac Metro All-League Allstar Team as a pitcher. Lastly, Chancellor May. He is also the perpetual optimist and a student advocate and is not likely to cut a major sport that our rivalry school is keeping and beating us at it. Solution: clean house. Hire a new coaching staff. Put in the lights!

Maybe he comes back?

After reviewing all of your above comments, I am beginning to think that all this NorCal/SoCal stuff is only a small part of the MBB issue. SLO and SB a pretty far out of the urban core of SoCal and they are doing better than us. Academic fairly equal. But the real hard cold fact is Sac is outdoing us big time and they would presumably have as much trouble as we do on recruiting top players and they do not have that problem. And I now think that lights are only another relatively small part of the problem. I hate to say this, but it is hard to not come to the conclusion that we need new and energized coaching to pull us out of this downward spiral. I do not think Rocko has had to fire a coach yet. This just might be the time to do it.

Moneyball sequel: “How The Stickyless Pitch Ruined Baseball.” Oh well, I never was good at jokes.

A fascinating story out of the WP today on what has happened to MLB since June 3 when MLB started enforcing the “no sticky stuff” rule. A lot. The WP analyzed 2 million pitches (mostly fast balls) and 1400 players in an agonizingly complex study (read: “the Bauer unit” equals the spin rate of the ball divided by the velocity of the pitch). Maybe only a story a baseball nerd would be able to understand, but interesting. Bauer unit on most pitchers is down significantly. “Contact rate” on 2 strike pitches up significantly. Strike outs down. One pitcher disabled due to trying too hard to compensate for the new rules. I’m thinking this might be a Moneyball sequel.

Very impressive indeed! I think Magic Man will see significant playing time this season.

GoAgs I understand your frustration with the MLB rule changes, but why are BB fans so much more sensitive to them apparently than NFL/College FB fans? My grandfather would not recognize present day college football. He was an ardent Stanford fan in The sixties. Same time I parked cars at Stanford Stadium as a HS student fall job. We were let in for the fourth quarter for free. I cannot tell you how many tie games I witnessed and nobody cared. Back in those days if you tied USC it was a WIN! The goal posts were on the TD line. No offensive players and defensive players. Just a few of many changes. Hey, I remember John Brodie playing free safety and he was actually very good. That change to defensive/offensive players was a total game changer for the game of football. I don’t recall all that much fuss about it. Can you imagine if MLB tried to do the same thing to their sport. Anyway, there are purists in all sports and we need them. But there should be limits. Today’s news that a US woman’s sprinter was banned from the Olympics because she had minimal traces of marijuana (“a performance enhancing drug”??) in her system is just ridiculous imho. Back to the Black Bear: try their tri-tip sandwich. Nothing frozen there. Good price and Great!

Yes! And guess who has more stuffed grizzly bears than anyone else? Trust me, it is not in the Black Bear chain. Berkeley do your great DNA stuff. Reinvent the grizzly! Just add the cost on to your football tickets.

OK, this is hopelessly off the title of this thread, but I shall proceed. It has to do with Bears and Aggies. My wife and I sometimes go to the Black Bear restaurant to eat (highly recommend it) . I once said: “why Black Bear” wife (Berkeley grad) said, “obviously started by a Cal Bear guy.” I never questioned that statement. Today I go by myself to the local Black Bear for a sandwich. They have this funny newspaper type menu, but I read it waiting and learned: founder is not a Cal guy, but an Aggie! The “Black Bear” is not the Cal bear, but named after the bear mascot of the founders high school in Mt. Shasta. I should have known that my Cal wife’s info was bad, because the official state mascot of California (adopted as mascot by UCB back in the day) is the “California Grizzly Bear,” not a black bear. The california grizzly has been extinct for over 100 years now and I am tempted to ask my wife why Cal would still have a revered animal hunted to extinction by humans as a mascot, but I will not (at least Stanford got rid of the Red Indian Mascot before they went virtually extinct). I digress further by saying that I had Professor Tracy Storer as a zoology prof back in the day. What a guy! He wrote the book on the California Grizzly.

I heard that UC got the Merced land donated free and clear and that was the main reason for the choice. Redding was also in the mix as I recall.

To add to Fugs comments on the difference between UC Davis and Sac State academics, a good friend of mine’s wife got her PhD. From Davis in Spanish. As such, she was in high demand (pre PhD) as a TA and later as a lecturer at Davis, Santa Barbara, Berkeley and, yes, Sac State. Later she became an assistant professor at Michigan State. Now she is at Santa Cruz- full professor. Her standard test on her student class quality was this: if in a 25 student class you asked a question of the class, how many raised their hands with the right answer? In all the UC’s it was generally this: 20 raised their hands. Five did not. Sac state: 10 raised. 15 did not. Michigan State: 5 raised. 20 did not. She described the Michigan students as a fairly “forlorn and unenthusiastic group overall.” Sac state students actually much better.

I agree River; but it is seldom that a team can boast of having two AA RBs: Larison and Ulonzo and a QB who can run, really run: Tompkins. So, yes we have great WRs, but how do they get the ball? Does the run actually set up the pass? I refer you to an article in The Signal by Brandon Skerda (2017) which addresses this exact question. The answer is an unqualified YES. Skerda used the Mixpanel JQZ Console to analyze this in an NFL context using an enormous body of official stats from the NFL. He uses the run first down and pass second down model. He starts with the premise that the first down has to be a “good run” defined as 5 yards or better. After a “good run” the likelihood of the next passing play being a caught pass improves exponentially over a pass after a poor run, less than 5 yards. Anyway a good read. Alert: Skerda works for Mixpanel. If 2021 season taught us anything it is that we can do the “good run” thing fairly well.

As far as the players are concerned, there is only one guy they call “Magic Man:” Tompkins. To me that says a lot.

I looked at the roster just announced. It appears we have very good potential for a great team. Solid OL. Very good DL. Good to great DBs. LBs, I do not know. But what I do know is that Hawk has an abundance of talent at RB and QB. At RB we have Ulo, we have Larison, we have Dixon and others. The question is at QB IMHO. HR is very good, but how can you keep a guy like Tompkins off the field every play. He is a beast! I understand the team calls him the “Magic Man” apparently because he can do things others cannot do. Hard to see that we are not an offensively oriented running team next season. Look forward to your thoughts, as I am not an expert in this stuff.

Has to be a money thing.