Nevada Dawg

Solid player but Georgia was merely a hat on the table as the Dawgs pursuit was tepid at best I am told. Why that is (was) I can't say.

Man, Bruins were as sharp as South Carolina was flat today. The game was never really in doubt and that's a rare thing to say about South Carolina women's basketball. Dawn Staley was as classy in her post-game remarks as Gino wasn't a couple days prior. She lost the game on the court today but certainly won in the court of public opinion. Congrats Bruins! You earned it!

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.

I was very enthusiastic about the addition of Bo Nix and he flourished in Eugene like I thought he would. Bo was far more mobile than Raiola and far further along as an on-field leader. I warn you--Raiola is a statue in the pocket and that was before his leg fracture. I hope it all works out for the Ducks but I have my doubts about this one.

When Raiola was committed to Georgia, several of the QB gurus on the board hoped that he would flip arguing that he was all arm talent and a statue in the pocket. That pretty much proved to be the case at Nebraska where he avoided having to sit on the bench behind Beck,, another QB in the same mold with even more arm talent. I think the Ducks are far better off with Dante should he choose to return. He should show improvement (if not many rushing yards) in his second year as a starter and that may work out just "ducky".

I remember someone above posting some stats that favored the Ducks over IU. Not to be nasty and so be it if it made you feel a little better, but this is why such posts often get the comment "Statistics are for losers." I also saw the comment something to the effect We'll be fine check our recruiting rankings. While there is often a solid relationship (statistically) between recruiting ratings and on-field performance, it is so far from perfection (as are the recruiting ratings themselves) as to be laughable. So don't simply "star gaze" to inform any betting decisions you may choose to make. Perhaps the most amazing factoid I have seen (cited by different sources) is that not one starter on Indiana's defense rose to the level of being a 4-star recruit. They seem to be a bunch of 3-star and lower FCS and smaller school FBS guys who came to Bloomington with chips on their shoulders and desperately hoping to prove themselves. I don't know about all y'all, but that is an amazing tale if true, illustrating that it is not the number of stars a recruit has that matters most. Remember that only 15-20% of 5-stars ever achieve the goal of being drafted in the first- round of the NFL draft.

I've now seen theplqy from several angles and definitely agree.

Trinidad Chambliss can become absolutely become electric in the clutch. But his problem tonight is he scored too quick at the end of the 4th Quarter to starve Miami of clock time. Even at that he brought his guys all the way down the field in the final 39 seconds. I simply watched this one not rooting for anything but an exciting game--and that sentiment was rewarded in spades. Whom do the Ducks match up best with? Can't say for sure, but should they get there, I think the Ducks would have the better shot against Miami. The reason I lean in that direction is that I saw several Cane secondary guys taking themselves off the field with arm and shoulder injuries. Watch the availability reports as the natty draws near. There is little doubt in my mind that tomorrow night's came with the Cigsters is going to be a war. As it is hard to beat a team twice in the same year, I'm leaning in on the webfeet. Go Ducks!

Place me in the Camp that thinks Dante needs another year or two of development to be likely to reach his full potential in the NFL. Should he ball out in this game to put out the Cig, he is very likely to be the first QB off the board, be able to sign an absolute fully guaranteed monster contract, and would likely be headed to the Las Vegas Raiders--an absolute disaster for any hopes of development IMHO. But with 50-75 million guaranteed, he's set for life. My biggest fear in that scenario is that Dante will be immediately fed to the wolves behind a terrible OL and could illustrate the old NFL mantra that NFL means ""Not for Long".

Pardon me for not reading all the comments (many I did read were insightful though). As I was reading pre-game comments on the Talk'n Dawgs site, many of the coach-types who hang out there started coming across like Miami would be the more physical team and ITO should be favored in this one. One guy even reached out advising me to get my butt to one of the local casinos and lay a healthy bet on the Canes. I should have listened. Their view (pre-game mind you) was that Miami would be a tougher match-up for the DAWGs than the Suckeyes. At this point I am just hoping that the Dawgs can be the first beat the jinx of having a bye, so as to earn the right of playing Miami in the semi-final next week. If that happens of course, it would indicate that OBD had taken care of Texas Tech and earned a semi-final berth. Go Ducks and Dawgs.

I understand yours and JJ's concern about Whittingham, but I have to admit that I admire the man and the way he coaches and I will be rooting for him (especially against Ohio State).