Shirt was a student design contest that the new Fan Council came up with. Somewhat more community involvement / crowdsourcing in the marketing this year

I was thinking they must have scripted most of these plays on the quarter break or something

Cody's years as OC were basically our best non-2018 teams as I recall -- 3-2 in the COVID season (likely would have been 4-2 and playoffs without a cancellation), 8-win playoff year hamstrung by QB uncertainty, and that 6-win year when we played a ton of eventual top-10 teams. Multiple quality FCS wins and an FBS win.

It could be something like the magic of 2018 was having both Hawkinses, Plough, and Speckman all at the table and two Big Sky MVPs on the roster, and we're not getting that back.

That’s the stadium attendance record I think? At least higher than last year’s highest announced attendance from a quick google. Certainly looked about as full as I ever saw it.

Based on what I understand of the more aggressive student outreach strategy and past trends we should get comparable but maybe not quite as earth shattering turnout next week. They deliberately put the first year stampede and t shirt giveaway on a separate week from orientation which helps spread out the early year enthusiasm and curiosity.

Pic from last night:

there were a few modest improvements I thought — return of the wildcat, an actual jet sweep to CJ and a few fakes, and a variation of the double pass MH has been running from under center where Lan got the lateral, faked the throw, then ran for TD himself.

Still more vanilla than Hawkins era but I’m hoping this at least keeps defenses guessing a bit more and forces Idaho to spend time to prepare for more stuff

We’re what the kids on Twitter would call a sicko team now I guess

I honestly thought that Gale had that from the video board angle

Human polls are currently in agreement with Sagarin and Massey ratings That Davis is a #11-15 team, but probably for different reasons. Voters are giving us the benefit of the doubt and ignoring the Cal loss; computers are giving us credit for the Cal loss. All rankings are probably directly or indirectly baking in last year's ending rank too.

No exception this year, as I understand it. Hoping for a quick score in the 1st quarter to get the students into the game early

Massey has UCD at #12 and #5 in the BSC as of now; Sac leapfrogged us with a surprising bump from beating current #50 Nicholls at home (as you may recall that was the committee's "quality win" that they said helped make the case for Sac over Davis last year).

Can't read too much into this small sample size other than a reminder that Sac is not going to be penalized for losing two FCS games and any win over a team in the top half of the FCS can influence models and voters.

https://masseyratings.com/cf/fcs/ratings

They hosted Utah a few years back, but it's grim for them. On the flip side, SDSU was fairly consistent in hosting at least one Pac game a year since I was a fan, even before the new stadium.

I would expect Davis to have luck somewhere between those two by being in a good recruiting ground and not being a commuter school. An expanded Aggie Stadium and locker room facility would probab;y be significantly better than SJSU's aging facility as well

Ags performed basically as Massey predicted — favored against SUU by a FG. Course that doesn’t tell the whole story of spotting them the pick six, SUU’s missed FG, etc.

Thus might turn out to be a bit of a quality win though if SUU solves their special teams problems

I don’t think Tompkins has even had a touch yet no?

The shovel pass is new and yeah we had a truck play but still not much in the way of sweeps, gadgetry, anything that would get playmakers the ball in the Hawkins era

On the contrary, this gives me a lot of 2017 and 2019 vibes

My weekly rant that if we’re going to have among the strictest academic requirements in the FCS then the expectation should be we have among the least penalties in the FCS. We’re not going to win on athleticism so we have to have precision

It’s ok makes it more exciting to spot them 7

Offense might marginally improve just with Tompkins healthy and all else equal …. But that’s if MH can hit him in a forward pass because we’re not doing really any sweeps, pitches, direct snaps etc to get playmakers the ball.

Relatedly, going to harp again that I hope the staff considers bringing back the wildcat package for the Red zone. Ungainly, predictable, but got the ball in 50% of the time at least

On the remaining schedule, Idaho, SUU, MSU, and Montana all have wins over FBS or FBS transitioning teams. Offense can’t execute like this vs the big hitters later

TD Williams!

I wonder if it’s just pressure/ nerves? Maybe he’s just lights out in practice but just overthinks things in games or something