David Marsh

The thing is that Oregon has the talent and hopefully the coaching takes a significant jump this year that undefeated is completely possible. Now will everything fall in place and it happens? Different story.

Washington is almost out of all that talent they built up during the Petersen era, especially on defense. They are going to have a good offense, unless they have some serious injuries, but are they going to have a good defense? Or at least an adequate defense. Oregon is in a similar boat in that Oregon is going to have a fantastic offense but their defense needs to improve. However, Oregon has the talent and the depth tos ee a major improvement and weather some injuries. The AP poll and polls in general have found it trendy to pick against the Ducks for the last ten years and usually the Ducks prove them wrong.

When I learned more details about it became more interesting. 25 mil as a base and then a proportion of a growing revenue. The sub was roughly $100 a year so that works out to be just slightly more than 8 dollars a month. I know I have things that cost me more per month that I don't fully use. I don't find that number too ridiculous in honesty. The problem was certainly exposure. If Apple would have a "featured" game or two every week to bring in the viewers I could see that helping to bring in subs. The Pac-12 network as it stands today is roughly 13 mil subs and that's it. That's pretty pathetic. If the Pac-12 on Apple had that many subs the payout per school would probably be fairly reasonable. The biggest difficulty would be to get non-Pac-12 fans to sign up, they probably wouldn't. Which goes back to the exposure problem. As this sub would probably just be Pac-12 sports that is a pretty hard sell to non-Pac fans. If it was part of a larger sports package then different story because we start getting people watching Pac games because they have the service. I think revenue probably would have been ok with the apple deal after a year. Exposure would have been a pretty big fail though with Apple only having one conference's worth of games. And 8 dollars a month is too steep for a non-conference fan to pay. I wouldn't pay that to watch SEC, B1G, Big-12, or ACC football because my main team wouldn't be on that platform. The whole Apple deal felt half baked to be honest. It had some interesting bits in it but the missing pieces were massive glaring wholes that needed to be addressed, namely non-conference exposure.

And disciplined teams don't fight. They support each other and keep their hot headed teammates in line and stop a fight from developing. Discipline will win fat more games than a bunch of talented individuals.

Oh boy... Yeah that's not a lesson to teach. Not trying and stop it... Or get out of the way to help it get broken up. But yelling at players for not joining in? That feels like some penalties waiting to happen. Especially this year when the whole league is going to be in edge.

Great point about defense needing to feed the ball to the offense. I wrote an article about number of offensive plays per game that Dillingham wanted to run last year and that does translate to a degree in number of points on the board... But the key is the defense getting off the field. 80 Plays Per Game is More Than an Offensive Goal FISHDUCK.COM Back on National Signing Day in early February, Offensive Coordinator Kenny Dillingham said that his Oregon...

Pretty sure last seasons D ranked lower. We do need our defense to be able to win one or two games on their shoulders.

ESPN games have been awful the past few years. The production quality has been low and the announcers garbage. Oddly enough I thought the Pac-12 network did a better job with production and commentary for those late night games. Just no one could watch them. I would hope those late night games at least make it onto Fox or FS1. The B1G network has better distribution by far that the PAC but it'd be nice not to be relegated to a conference network.

If they have fixed the defense like I think they have them it shouldn't be bad. What destroyed us regularly last year we're those easy underneath throws. I think Lanning has that fixed with new athletic linebackers, and a better front pass rush. The secondary actually did fairly well last year considering those underneath throws were often linebacker coverage failures and a lack of pass rush meant the secondary had to hold up longer which is always difficult. With that said... I do feel the secondary has improved and solved some of their own problems as well.

As it's four teams in the B1G on the west coast the books won't be as bad as I feel they would have been. However... When Washington asked for more money for travel I think we got a hint at the cost. Washington wanted their layout to be closer to 40 mil to start. Oregon has enough support to weather the storm... But we'll have to track the revenue numbers I think.

Key quote here. "And this was something that the board and our key stakeholders encouraged." Those stakeholders... Was one of them Fox???

I find myself that so much of my daily life is wrapped up in Ducks football (for good or ill) and if I was to stop following it I don't know what I would do instead. I would say read more... but I do a whole lot of reading via Ducks news... I guess I could read more other stuff... but I read a lot of non-fiction and do a lot of research for my job so I don't feel like I need to do more of that either. I am hoping that things may snap back to some semblance of what we all love but I doubt that is going to be quick. I actually think it could take a decade or two for people to fully realize what they have lost. I don't have an NFL team or any interest in the NFL (I root for my pro Ducks but I don't follow their teams all that closely). I don't have a NBA team... though I was once a Blazer's fan (when I was in middle school) but now I don't care, their season is too long and the playoff is way to drawn out. I have a connection to Oregon as an alum and that gives this more meaning to me, but so much of that is also steeped in the Civil War and that relationship with Oregon State. I recently drove though Corvallis and had a strange urge to want to paint everything green and yellow. So losing those sort of things will hurt. The Rose Bowl's importance is all but gone and replaced with the playoff which I will probably rant about in a future article. So much is gone... but sadly I don't know what we replace it with besides nothing. Well, maybe FCS football, that is looking more and more like what college football used to be... or at least it looks a whole lot more to the product it has always been. But yet again... I don't have a connection to Portland State (my local FCS team)... so it's the same problem I have with the NFL.

The hype machine is in full effect around USC. They have Riley and a Heisman quarterback. It's been trendy for some time to pick the Ducks low. But... We'll see Trojan, Ute, Husky and Beaver tears very soon.

Surprised ESPN walked away after their one bid in honesty. The pac-12 representatives over playing their hand by countering with 50 doesn't surprise me... But basically ESPN did to the PAC-12 what Knight did to Cristobal. One bid... Take it or leave it... And the walks away. There was no bidding war that I believe was anticipated.

Oh I think they are a mess... But they did try something new which is far more than what can be said about pretty much every other B1G program.

I'd say Maryland is the flashiest brand in the B1G (apart from the new comers) and they don't have anything on Oregon either in the uniform game or on the field. Oregon has disrupted college football as a rising football power and in the uniform game. The B1G is full of a whole lot of boring and traditional uniforms... Oregon isn't that.

Conference champions will get an auto bid .. but most will still fit the criteria I posted. And just because there is a conference champion doesn't guarantee them a good seeding. They just get to get seeded.

They won't. The formula is pretty straightforward and has been in place since the BCS era. 1. Undeafed + Power Conference 2. One loss + Power Conference + Conference Champion 3. One loss + Power Conference + blue blood 4. Group of Five undefeated + conference champion + major quality wins + multiple years proving this = in (only happened once and that required a covid season) 4. 2 loss power conference champion 5. 2 loss power conference with quality wins and ideally a blue blood. I don't see the formula changing. I probably forgot something in my formula there.

But... Oregon State has played Portland State... They have also lost to Eastern Washington. No real need for me to mention that second one ... But Vernon Adams did a number on them and I just wanted to mention it.

Well with a 10 game schedule.. absolutely no road games. Granted I wouldn't count Oregon state a road game. That's one of the few games played that an away game is a bus trip. With 3 ooc games (9 game conference schedule) I say one away game to say Cal, Stanford, or WSU would be fine.

Hey... I wrote an article about that. Now I think it has a whole lot of flaws to it looking back a year but my dream is we see something good come from this slog... But I'm not feeling too hopeful at the moment. The Eventual College Football Renaissance FISHDUCK.COM The Great College Football Schism is Coming, and it will leave College Football divided between the...

Yes... I gave the summary of the really interesting bits though. So hopefully that gives you a little something.

Today in Canzano's article there were some very interesting tidbits about the whole process. I know many just dislike Canzano but he did go over how the media deal was managed, and just how badly managed it all was that doesn't come as a shocker to anyone. The short version is that there was a group out together to get a deal and they did actually get a 30 mil deal out of ESPN but didn't take it last fall because they thought they could do better. After that ESPN became unhelpful. There was poor communication from this group to anyone. Canzano's sources were always those on the university side of things and they were told a whole lot of misinformation from the sound of it and they admit that now. Also it looks like Fox was pretty much disrupting the whole process. So I feel pretty good about my article which is built on public information and the public narrative as I don't have any inside sources. Plenty of mismanagement on the pac-12 side of things but after one offer, that they should have taken, the two biggest companies in this whole process had no interest in keeping the conference around. If you can access the Canzano article it is an interesting read as to some of the behind the scenes chaos. Canzano: 'The gun was empty': The downfall of the Pac-12 Conference WWW.JOHNCANZANO.COM A tale of hubris and hollow promises.

No one is happy about the conference realignment... Except Fox and ESPN.

It does kinda feel like Fox may be overpaying those LA schools by this logic. Are they worth paying 60 mil? Are they going to add that much value? Oregon and Washington will gather a good amount of eyeballs and only have a half share.