Solar

The circumstances surrounding the game, injuries, byes, vs 8 games straight, away game, hostile cold environment, are the reasons. Dan Lanning has shown his ability to keep the team engaged under less than ideal circumstances before, so let's hop that continues and we can get off to a fast start.

I will say the drama with Georgia's placement will be short lived. If they win they will be back in, and if they lose they'll be out of the bubble.

I'm not bored, but it certainly gives us less to talk about. Everyone talking about the scandalous rankings, but Oregon isn't part of that. Things haven't been perfect for the team, but while we win big, there isn't as much dry powder for critical takes. Hence less posting. I am concerned about our Offensive performance against speed bump Maryland, and the wear and tear accumulation at this point. Fingers crossed that the players have it in them to maintain focus and play hard while worn out, yet somehow don't get more injuries..

He's probably hiding that they decided to just play Ultimate Frisbee for practice to keep the contact to a minimum...17 games and all. I'm only half joking.

I read a scenario where there is an 8 way tie for 1st place in the SEC with just two conference games weeks left. They would all have 2 losses prior to the CCG. Which would mean post conference championship game their would be 7 2 loss teams and one 3 loss team that was ranked second best by the SEC at the end of the regular season. When this level of parity happened in the PAC12 they called it cannibalism and better luck next year chumps. When it happens in the SEC it just means they are the best conference and all of those top 8 deserve to be in the playoffs. I'll take the glass half full approach here and laugh at every SEC team that gets left out that "deserved" to be in, just like FSU last year. There will be more than 1 of them for sure.

"They simply are too much of a juggernaut for anyone to beat them but THEMSELVES. " I prefer we do NOT head down the road of tOSU fans with that kind of mentality. You have to always respect the team on the other side. If we get beat, it means the other team played better than us and we need acknowledge that.

It's a toss up between these two teams right now. And if we both win out to the CCG, then the loser will get the #5 seed as discussed, which is a pretty nice path to have if it truly ends up being the G5 and B12 opponents as mentioned above. Nobody has it better than us right now. There is so much to lose, so the team needs to keep it's head on straight and keep working hard and competing.

I thought it was Holden running the fake, he looked quick and agile, moreso than our tight ends.

There is a saying from a book, "They remembered everything and learned nothing."

The BYU kicker is a stud. He took a few practice swings early in the drive, then spent the next 5-10 minutes joking and chatting it up with his teammates with a big happy smile on his face. He strolls in and nails a 44 yarder really clean and would have been good from over 60.

Defense was clearly the reason we won. More specifically, batted balls are why we won. It has to have been about 10 of them, a fair amount of which we're going to be 1st down passes with their elite WRs consistently getting open. The sheer amount tells me the scouts identified the opportunity and they trained extra hard on it this week. The offense would have been the reason we lost, being very inconsistent. On the whole this was a letdown low emotion game, with some fixes to make on the OL and some minor injuries to recover from.

BYU in the fight of their lives with Utah..

Remember the days of the yellow pages with everyone naming their business "AAA something something"...so they would show up on the first page? Haha.

Yuck, yuck, yuck. And I'm not laughing. How did we double their score? Feels almost as bad as that Idaho win. Not happy to lose Birch AGAIN. Can't wait for Tez to get back, and I'm sure Dillon feels the same way. Glad to be 10 and 0 and still will be ranked #1 in the country for another week.

Maryland came to play and we didn't. Dan Lanning looks like he is coaching practice. Are the fans even loud?

I don't want throwback anything for the CFP, especially the CFCG. What if we win it all and want to do a throwback of those? A throwback of a throwback? No. Let's write a new chapter.

"Could" I guess they could beat those teams. Penn State not so likely. It's so weird for us going from a conference that had the most parity to a conference that has the least.

The photo above was just a photo, not a freeze frame of the feed the refs had access to. There was a video from behind the end zone showing the ball's nose see daylight and touch the turf just before Stewart hit the ground. To me that was the only conclusive video, but apparently not enough for the replay team.

Just to close this out, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Lanning has said he has a sports psychologist consultant that provides him with a theme every week. He doesn't have to be a genius motivator himself, but he does take ownership of it. Definitely all the smiling thumbs down by the offensive players at the end of the game near the goal line makes sense after the video. They were pining to go for it and score rather than kneeling out the game. No mercy.

If the new QB is not substantially better than Moss, then Riley will have destroyed his last claim to fame of being a QB whisperer, having unnecessarily thrown a QB under the bus. That will not go over well with elite recruits with options.

Bowl eligible! After we win against Maryland next week we'll be playoff eligible.

I didn't know there was such a thing. I'd figured Big Noon Kickoff was the defacto pregame for the B1G.

Everyone needs an escape from that, so why not FishDuck? I love it. Thank you Charles.

Physicality cannot come at the expense of the goal of an offense, which is to score as many points per drive as possible. Physicality for the sake of physicality is just a meat head peeing contest. I appreciated this line as well. It's why there is little to fear from bottom feeder B1G teams: "At least in the Pac-12, teams in the lower half of the conference generally had a puncher’s chance because they were still capable of scoring points. But, in the B1G, that does not seem to be the case."