Solar

It would seem increasing the size of the playoffs field was just in time for NIL. It gives the mercenary teams a few mulligans to get things straightened out, and potentially have some lower seeded teams that are playing better than anybody by the timee the playoffs start.

"Is the staff flexible enough to tweak their system to fit the talent they have? I think they're giving this team too much to think about and execute given their respective struggles. It just might be time to keep things simple add strategies once the team executes the simple things first" Recall in 2022 Lanning was looking years ahead trying to install the Georgia defense regardless of who we had on our roster, but left Dillingham to do what he thought was appropriate on offense. Dilly thought that tailoring the offense to the strengths of the players he had at the time was appropriate (very well documented). The Offense screamed ahead of our defense. In 2023 when Dilly left, Dan Lanning said yeah this offensive scheme that is highly efficient works great, and brought in Stein on the agreement he would continue the scheme. That worked great in 2023 when the Offense was mostly carryover from the previous year. Now in 2024 we have brought in all these new players and we stuff them into this scheme that works really good. Or at least it did with the previous players... We know Stein is tailoring plays to the ball handlers, but maybe struggling tailoring to the strengths/weaknesses of our O-Line? For sure he did not re-evaluate the scheme with a clean sheet to the extent Dilly did in 2022. This could be growth area for DL to really embrace the off-seasons and early seasons to retool the scheme as much as necessary to maximize the ability of the players you actually have, not the players you wish you had.

We beat a 25th ranked Boise State team that played very well, while doing everything that would typically cause you to lose. Rankings are a strange thing at this point in the season. Still a lot of projection about what they will be later in the season. If I'm projecting, then I'd say Oregon is around 10th in the country.

I think Dillon is close to where Bo was at this point in his Ducks career. Another way to look at it is it's basically the ceiling of what's possible for a QB in a Dan Lanning high efficiency offense year 1.

We're playing at top 25 level with the mistakes against Boise State. Continued experience building and learning of all the new new players can get us into top ten, but potential is a four letter word. We somehow need to prove ourselves better in conference than one of OSU, Penn State, USC to make the dance.

Been thinking about this too. One of the reasons the Pac12 was so hard is you had to be really good teams with a wide variety of characteristics. You had to beat Stanford and Utah at bully ball, and also beat WSU and OSU with pint sized speedsters. The more bias ourselves to compete with the B1G bullies, the less adept we are at beating the pint size teams. That being said, I think the Beavers will be the worst team we've played so far. If our team can treat it like a business trip it could give us some confidence going into league play.

I'm torn with this game. On one hand the OLine blocked significantly better in the second half. God bless Charlie Pickard but I don't want to see him on the field outside of garbage time. He is not him as my son would say. We still only put up 3 touchdowns and a field goal on offense. Our pass defense was great, but they still put up 34 points. Boise State's secondary was trash in coverage, yet we barely were able to take advantage of it. Dillon Gabriel had another great game despite the circumstances. Unlike hopeless Michigan, we have a QB. We just need to play our best disciplined ball. Hopefully we can get there over the next few games.

They also messed up the timeout bars at the end when BSU was burning them. Very stressful when watching a bootlegged version with no audio.

Relative to Saturday morning a week ago my expectations are clearly lowered. I don't see us winning against any top 10 teams this year. We could still win every regular season game and make the playoffs. It's too early to say much more than that. Maybe BSU and Idaho are really good this year and we beat both with a foot shooting gallery. Maybe they are just okay and we won't be able to clean up our mistakes sufficiently to prevent losses to other decent teams.

If Sappington That dude deserves the game ball!

That's floating in my mind, that despite us being really crappy this is a heck of an entertaining game.

I recall in Lanning's first season the teams got significantly better. Wow 2 special teams return touchdowns. I don't care what the review said, he let go of the ball before he crossed the line. It's a meme at this point, why do people still do it?!

That was a really aggressive defensive call against that compact formation. It looked bad before the snap and got worse with the stunts. Jeanty is a special dude.

He's been out there but really flat footed. May still not be 100% from the injury last week.

That's the kind explanation. Feels there isn't enough time for receivers to get 15 yards down field before Gabriel gets hammered. Hoping the unexpected call catches the D off guard. But it was a slow developing run play. Do we not have a screen play in the playbook? Those are really effective when your OL is a seive because it doesn't feel any different than normal to the DL as sad as that sounds, LoL

That's the second intention drive killing play call by Stein. There was a really stupid YouTube video about Oregon playing bad against Idaho or purpose for the gambling bets, but legitimately, are their people in the program intentionally sabotaging the team? I would think coaching salaries and NIL would keep that stuff in check.

We've got dudes on this team. No excuse to not be consistently stomping the other team. Geez. And pick up the ball Tez! Ugh.

18 rushing yards and 4 sacks in the half. It's incomprehensible how we could go from having on of the best OLs in the country last year to this with three of the starters returning.

You mean our former projected first round draft Conerly? If this OL keeps deteriorating it will become recruit repellent. We already aren't doing great, but this will be a nail in the coffin. But you have to figure Lanning will pay attention to not losing our on OL recruits. This will be a test of how long Lanning's leash is on his position coaches.

Was watching on YouTube bootlegs for about 5 minutes, then NBC swooped in and copyright them all. Every other game stream is still up. Kudos to NBC for defending their racket. Thanks to the radio now, although it sounds pretty brutal. No improvement from last week.

NIU played better and won straight up. No flukes required. In fact the in their last drive they were given a clearly bad spot by a side judge that forced them to kick without running down the clock further, then after the clock stoppage to check the spot (which wasn't overturned due to crap camera angle), they forgot to run the clock saving a timeout for Notre Dame in their last drive. Freeman decided to kick a 62 yards with :05 and a time out left. What a chump. It was blocked (2nd of the day).

Stupid for obvious reasons that don't even need to be explained.

Happy to report the senior laden Northern Illinois is taking it to Notre Dame in North Bend. NIU is averaging 14 yards per play vs Notre Dame's 4 in the second quarter. NIU has the lead despite Notre Dame receiving the opening kick.

? Why are you looking in this topic if that is the case? Where else do you recommend we talk about this so we don't spoil things for you? I'm not trying to be rude, it's just an unreasonable request to a problem you're intentionally creating and can easily mitigate yourself.

Another freaking bang-bang PI not called! Really blatant knocking the receiver to the ground with the ball still 3 to 5 feet away, such that the ball hit the defender in the numbers with the receiver out of the path of the ball. Announcers said it's because they were both going for the ball. No. Modern football refs have been given a pass not to make the calls a basketball ref has to make all game long. Just because it happens quickly doesn't mean you can't judge it. Man up, trust your eyes and call it geez.