Nevada Dawg

When I completed my bracket prior to the tournament tipoff, I had both Michigan and UConn progressing to the final four and Michigan winning it all. After watching the offensive machine of the Arizona Wildcats, I am not so confident about Michigan winning, but the Wolverines are a very solid team . I kinda lean toward Illinois falling to the tournament tested coach Dan Hurley who seems to always find a way to win big games. However I admit that Illinois is much better than I have given them credit for. And I have to admit that I turned away from the Duke-UConn game and was shocked several hours later to learn that UConn ended up winning that puppy.

It was a funny year for SEC basketball. There were a fair number of very good teams and no elite ones. The SEC's outcomes this year pretty much matched what the B1G usually does. I wouldn't bet too much, however, on the league staying down for long.

Good article Charles. There is much truth to what you lay out here.

I didn't watch many Duck games this year, but what I saw suggested serious depth and talent deficits. Whether this was from an NIL deficit, I can't say and will defer to Charles on this one. My team suffered perhaps the most embarrassing loss of any in the first round, losing badly to a less talented Saint Louis aggregation. They didn't even come close to resembling the spirited group they had been in the regular season. I began to wonder early in the second half if some of the players were on the take to gamblers. No one I know close to the team as any good explanation for how poorly the Dawgs played in this one.

Congrats to the B1G getting so many teams to the Sweet 16. This is BY FAR the best conference showing in the big dance since...would you believe last century. Typically with an initial draw of 7-9 teams, the B1G gets an average of about 2-3 teams in the Sweet Sixteen in a good year and the numbers making the elite 8 were sparce indeed. I saw a large number of fundamentally sound B1G teams this week and think it very likely that one of them (probably Michigan) will break the conference's 25-year drought on winning it all. They are far from the most athletic teams, but the kind that would make John Wooden proud, playing team-oriented approaches rather than the all-too-often hero ball we see so much of today.

David Marsh's post is right on IMHO. Lanning and the younger Ducks got bounced rather rudely by the older ,more experienced team in both 24 and 25. 2023 Natty champ Michigan was an older, very experienced squad, as were the 21 and 22 Georgia national championship squads. Lanning will have his successes, I believe, if he can put together similar squads, which will involve convincing some of his older contributors to stick around to run it back another year in Eugene for the pride and pleasure of raising the big trophy at the end of the year.

Miami had some very good football teams in the 1970s and 80s. One of those teams was matched against Georgia in the old Tangerine Bowl IIRC. I was in Athens by then, was familiar with Miami during the three years I had spent in MAC country, and warned Dawg partisans they had better prepare diligently for this team or risk getting their butts kicked. Vince Dooley preached the same message, but the scuttlebutt I heard surrounding the upcoming game was that Ole Coach was crying wolf as he so often did. I don't remember the score but Miami did indeed kick some tail that game and were clearly the better team on the field that day. Had the two teams played 10 games, I think Miami would have won seven of them!

Goes without saying doesn't it?

I was flabbergasted to learn that there is a Pro Disc Golf circuit in this country. We had a player and family member of the couple I was visited in the greater Boston to dinner one night and he told us all about it. He wasn't one of the big winners in the league (a raw rookie playing that summer before entering his real job in the fall after graduating from college) but he easily made expenses and was having fun. When he told me he was living in the extreme western part of Virginia, I remarked "Sounds like you live out in David Baldacci ( a famous popular novelist) country". Nonplussed, he said "Yeah he lives about a mile from me and is a pretty fair disc golfer himself".

I certainly wasn't saying that crap about Nix. I sent Charles a clip of Nix's highlights and said he was bound to flourish in Eugene. Lanning knew it as well having to work his tail off to stifle the guy running the Auburn offense when he was DC at Georgia. I am nowhere near as optimistic about Raiola. Nix could move and take himself out of problematic situations. Raiola cannot and is so slow as to be a statue in the pocket. I wish the guy no ill will of course but actually breathed a sigh of relief when he flipped from Georgia to Nebraska on signing day. And as a Duck fan, I hope I am wrong by the way, but fear that I am not.

That Ole Miss game in Oxford will be interesting. I wonder if he will be showered with bottles and other missiles the way he was in Knoxville on his return after deserting the Vols so early in the game (for USC IIRC).

I'll never forget my first true winter storm in Northern Ohio when I moved there for graduate school. I had about a 20-minute walk across campus to my office. Being a Californian, I had no true winter coat (My mother bought me a reversible Jacket with fur which I turned out (like a fool) and made myself look like a Sasquash. I had no head covering. I walked in the building feeling no pain and the Department Head said "I envy you Californians getting all that sun on the beach in December". I hadn't been to the beach and was wind burned from the 25 MPH winds and -20 wind chill that morning. And I thought I was going to die 15 minutes later as my frozen ears thawed. I immediately thought of that day as I read about the frozen East Coast this week. Poor devils!

Here in Minden, NV (near Carson City), it has been the mildest winter of the 10 years I've been here. The house is at 4800 feet but has had one-quarter inch of snow all Winter. It is chilly with highs of 40-50 degrees but mostly sunny. I have three nearly 11,000 foot Sierra Nevada peaks out my front window that are snow-covered however. My bestie, who lives outside of Boston, has had 30 inches of snow with below zero wind chills the past couple nights. I know this native Californian is missing his old Santa Cruz County home these days, poor devil.

Informative article, particularly for those who consistently geek out on recruiting rankings. When I saws the title of this thread, I thought this was going to be an assessment of transfer additions who have proved most meaningful to the team ON THE FIELD during the Lanning era. My guess for number 1 (given my assumption) was incontestable I thought: Bo Nix followed perhaps by Tez Johnson. I don't mean to be difficult here, but in my world , rankings based on...others' rankings, are next to worthless. Let's evaluate the transfers based on actual contributions to the team made between the lines.

The Ducks certainly aren't alone in this regard. The Georgia Bulldawgs lost a couple of very promising DBs even though they saw the field a good bit as freshmen. One was probably feeling squeamish as the Dawgs snapped up two very experienced CBs who are going to play ahead of him. So he portaled to Ohio State where the likelihood of becoming a starter (not to mention the NIL payout) will be higher. While we are at it, the head recruiting Guru at Georgia mentions Ohio State as one of the leading programs that is getting hammered with important losses in the portal this year. I think when the smoke clear, a fair number of top programs will be licking their wounds over players they'd hoped to retain that ended up flying the coop.