Solar

One really positive improvement I saw was the defense setting the edges as a priority, which was something they really needed to clean up in prior games. Sure UCLA's run game sucks, but we didn't let them bounce outside at all when they tried, which prevented any big run plays. UCLA rushed for -1 yard in the first half.

That was a big 10 style win. Also, the players took their foot of the gas after really dominating most of the first half. A VERY dangerous thing to do on an "After Dark" game in the southwest. I'm pleased with the win. I think the motivation will be there for Ohio State to play with our hair on fire.

https://athlonsports.com/college-football/power-five-ad-memphis-honest-truth-bad-pac-12-realignment-offer geez man.

I watched parts of the game. It's a textbook Cristobal team at this point in terms of personnel. Cristobal has reached his ceiling at Miami, we'll just have to see how far that can take him. Cam Ward is excellent, and I'm glad Cristobal is not ruining him just yet. I see lots of high 4 and 5 star athletic talent that doesn't have a strong feel for the game. Nothing new there.

Hey now, OIT doesn't deserve to be slandered like that. Actually, they haven't had a football team for about 30 years. I went to OIT in1996 the inaugural year of their track team, which I walked onto. They had just redone the track and put a full length javelin runway right into the football field. The story I heard was they put the javelin runway in that way to make sure nobody got any ideas about starting the football program up again. That they got rid of the football team because of costs and that the players were too rowdy and troublemaking, for the small school.

I took the facts in the article and came up with a twist on the concern. You can be merely top 10 in recruiting and still win a Natty, if you have superior coaching, both developmentally and in game planning. My concern is the lack of local talent means you don't have the bandwidth to be great at both. We all flamed DeBoer for being a horrible recruiter at UW, but he spent the bye weeks before our games game planning how to beat us while the Oregon staff was on the road building the 2024 class. Coaching staffs are time and energy constrained between recruiting and being a coach. The extra effort required for recruit non-local is definitely putting us at a disadvantage, but it will manifest itself in some combination of recruiting AND coaching.

UNLV has been flip flopping, I wouldn't trust anything I read about them. UTSA should be added to the list of possibilities.

Aren't there like 30 other UCLA statistics that also look really bad that if they just turned them around they could compete better? I'm not really getting the point there. I think Oregon controls it's own destiny in this game. If we show up and play an away game in the southwest after dark we win. If we don't then we could lose or look bad winning again.

I thought the house case was class action. Is it not? I think the article subject could happen, but would not be the final destination, which will be more along the lines of what JPJ describes. I'm convinced that not every B1G and SEC school will make it into the pay to play league, and a few left overs from other conferences will find their way in.

Not completely true..the greater the number of individuals, the higher the probability of finding better players. Simple statistics. If I had 100 3 stars I'd argue I could field a better team than from 20 4 stars, especially at the college level.

I would flip it around to CAP-12. It's the common lingo in schools right now that "cap" means you are lying or faking it. My son is always saying "That's cap." When he sees or hears something that is trying to deceive us.

As opposed to the Will Howard/Avery Johnson affair. It's weird OSU ran their own QB out of town, yet picked up a QB run out of town from somewhere else. At least Howard's running ability is a fit for Kelly's offense.

Michigan State looks much like Oregon State did when Smith arrived, just starting from a higher floor. Their defense is not good. The QB is elite but inexperienced and not getting much help from the rest of the offense. They should be about the same as UCLA, maybe a little worse.

Did you miss seeing that they have Mario on their sidelines? Mario will lose interest in the high flying offense, and force the OC to put handcuffs on Ward to play 3 yards and a cloud of dust against the lesser teams in conference, exposing his team to a loss or two. It's like clockwork.

Will Howard on the other hand absolutely was going to lose his starting job to Avery Johnson who is amazing. OSU flopped picking Howard, but pulled the rabbit out of the hat bringing in Kelly to scheme him into something that can make the offense work.

Totally agree. There are many reasons for the 3 point home advantage and referee calls are one of them.

I was thinking the same. They will at least think twice before enraging 10s of thousands of rabid fans at an away game.

The end will be way past my bedtime. My only hope is we play good enough that the second half is garbage time and I can DVR it to see how the backups did.

With so many teams there are bound to be some really good and really bad teams. I do think that the days of parity we were used to in the PAC12 are over. They live on in the Big 12, but who cares. Our new reality is weekly exposure to wildly varying quality of teams. Losses to the bottom half of the league will be unfathomable upsets, while games against the top of the league will be national games of the year. Purdue is a well known steaming pile this year.The fact they kept it as close as they did with the Beavers makes me think the Beavers aren't worse than I thought.

The trophy should just be a a beautiful fir tree carved out of a beautiful piece of wood mounted in a bronze base. Maybe the wood should a be a waterproof variant like teak for longevity. What to call it, I don't know. Something stupid but perhaps more original would be a carved woodshed model with an axe in front. Implying who killed who that year.

Attacking the edges is the one weakness of this team because our interior OL doesn't have the speed to pull and block in open space as well as prior years. Watching Cal play SDSU was an eye opener of how bad SDSU is. I'm sure the beavers defense is okay, but 49 points isn't as amazing as I thought. In the B1G I'd say Indiana has the best offense I've seen so far.

2024 would look WAY worse if you compared it to the average of the 3 no conference games only, especially compared to 2023.

I thought Stein play calling was noticeably different from previous games. It was far more pro style, much less of creatively getting people the ball in space within 2 yards of the LOS. Tez didn't have as big of a game because of it, but it was far more efficient on the whole.

With regards to Strothers, I'm always dubious of coaches being so sure about their evaluations based on practices alone. I'm a long time believer in saying that when a player goes on the game field and shows you who they really are, you need to pay attention and forget about how they practice. There are some people that will always have that extra something when it's the real game. My hunch is they reviewed the film from BSU and thought he did well, and spent practice for the week just getting the lineup solidified with him in it. Kudos to them for doing that.

(don't hate me forever) 30-27 Beavers in overtime (Sappington misses?) 1 1 330 I would love to be way off the mark, but if there was ever a time for a hot take this is it.