Nevada Dawg

I agree with everything you said Hayward Duck with one exception and I'll invite you to clarify and/or correct any misconception I might be under. By what metric have the Texas Longhorns been elite over the past 15 years? True they won a natty in the 20-aughts, maybe 2005. But the Longhorns I've been watching have been underachievers since then IMHO and anything but elite. Indeed, they haven't even been notably good since then save last year. Maybe the difference in our opinions stems from us using very different metrics for "elite". I'm really not trying to be argumentative here but am puzzled a bit about Texas and elite being in the same universe, except for the one Natty year a long time ago.

Interesting perspective. I have been thinking myself about the development of an elite program in Eugene and would argue that we are not there by any means as of this date. Lanning is certainly doing the right things in recruiting and retention of players and assistants and working hard to establish a culture. But elite-ness is as much an attitude as anything, and with some successes in truly big games, which have not yet happened, that elite mentality will grow and ,hopefully, prove to be somewhat self-sustaining. I watched that evolution in Athens over a 5-year period 2016-2021, and Dan saw it too. Thus, he has the template and the drive to potentially make it happen. Keep your fingers crossed.

As a dyed in the wool Dawg fan, I have very mixed feelings about losing Dell McGee. On the one hand, he was such a valuable member of Kirby's staff who was largely unknown to all of us but the closest followers of the team. On the other hand, there maybe is nobody on the staff that I am happier for in getting his shot. He is a Georgia guy all the way having had a long career coaching at the high school level in Georgia. He knows the state exceptionally well and I suspect he will put a most credible team on the field at Georgia State--a decent smaller program by the way. I'll be rooting hard for him.

Yeah, I prefer chicken to duck as a culinary delight but Duck to chicken (by a mile) on the gridiron. I'm no fan of those Gamecocks from near your neck of the woods!

Without knowing the metric for "best" here, I'll bet it is Carson Beck (of course I am biased on this one).

The last two Raiders' head coaches took this Raiders fan toward other teams (Niners, Eagles) by their stupidity. I saw that the Raiders looked like a different team after canning Josh Mc Daniel last year. Maybe this wouldn't be a horrible place for Bo Nix to land.

When I am looking around for a football chat program to listen to, Matt Hayes is always high on my list (along with Greg McElroy). Good writer and solid analyst IMHO. He is like a lot of us who liv(ed) in the South and came to appreciate the dedication Lanning showed in all his coaching stops before landing in Eugene. I believe I was one of the first on the forum to tell you guys that you were going to love this guy. And given the history with past Head Coaches in recent years, I was overjoyed to hear that he quickly responded that he had everything he needed in Eugene and was staying when Bama came sniffing around. Gotta love that kind of loyalty these days and I suspect it will rub off on his teams.

Keep your chin up girl and rest assured that all of us on the forum are pulling hard for you and will be looking for forward to the resumption of your contributions to the OBD conversations.

In its defense, the NCAA was structured to govern amateur college football and not whatever the courts have made it today--a more nauseating version IMO. I am fine with NIL preventing what was close to involuntary servitude, and i am not even against the establishment of minor pro football leagues. But...let the damn NFL pay for it and let's not pretend it is COLLEGE football. Were it allowed on the forum, I might get a record number of downvotes for this post. But I could care less--this is my opinion and I am getting pretty sick of the exaggerated focus on money at all levels of the game that I once loved for its traditions and pageantry. That pastime. mi amigos, is dead.

I don't remember where I saw it but I read one proposal to move early signing day all the way back to the August period just before the season kicks off and keep the traditional February date for those who see the August commitment/signing date as to rushed. This proposal would certainly declutter the month of December for coaches but might severely limit the number of early enrollees who would like to be on campus in December for any ongoing Bowl practices and to enroll in January to get a head start on their freshman year/season. It is certainly true that December is a ridiculously busy time for coaches.

Love this post. Also it looks to be the beginning of a kind of thread I've wanted to see for some time on the forum and which is common on the Talkin Dawgs blog--one hinting on how coaches talk to and motivate players and discussing how players are adapting to the winter workouts. Many players on the Georgia team have commented that this is the toughest most stressful period of the year and the time when team culture and bonding is solidified. Interestingly, this is the time when even the biggest, baddest, most talented recruits often hit the freshman wall, learning that they aren't so big bad, and talented as they thought they were. They will either react positively to this information and grind all the harder or founder and become a risk of underachieving. Hopefully, the guys will buck up and start the process of developing into solid B1G level players, but all too often that that may not happen. Successful coaches treat this as an opportunity for significant growth, often by administering healthy does of tough love at this juncture. It is all part of the process of molding a good football team. So posters, let's hear whatever you can dig out about workouts and players' reactions to them. This information is muy interesante to this fan.

Probably shouldn't say this because I don't mean to dump on a kid who could start for Michigan, but my inside sources suggest that you might be happy that the Ducks didn't land him. My intel is that the Dawgs passed on the kid without making contact because he was lacking in the speed/quickness department (at least by Georgia standards). That resonated with me because Georgia needs safties, but they have mucho young talent that the staff liked better.

I was one who sharply criticized some of his in-game decisions (not always publicly) the first year I started following Duck football more closely. Some were dreadful to be sure. He doesn't seem to learn from mistakes but I'm thinking maybe it is time for us to FINALLY put this guy in the rear-view mirror.

Harvard and Yale are starting to show their cracks but it take a long time for them to become apparent. Academic reputations are often 20+ years behind the times.

The burnout factor and declining quality of life for head coaches will drive many, including some of the very best, from the college ranks in the coming years. Clearly it seems easier to "have a life" as an NFL Head or assistant coach than a college guy who, if not actively coaching on the field, is having to recruit, re-recruit the guys you already have, and to work at it 12 months of the year to achieve success you hope to have in today's college landscape. Head guys are going to have to be young, driven, and extremely energetic. Having a supportive family seems necessary as well. But I can almost guarantee you that we will see some apparent coaching superstars choose to walk away from their posts in the coming years because the required effort is too stressful. I have heard the story from several sources this year that, either before or immediately after the SEC Championship (after seems the more likely) Nick Saban leaned in to Kirby Smart on the field and said "Man I'm too old for this crap". Kirby claims to have been as surprised as anyone by Saban's sudden retirement, but I am pretty sure that he had a hunch that departure could well be forthcoming. It was pretty well known that Saban believed that portal- induced free agency and no regulations on NIL and roster tampering was ruinous for college football.

Early rankings mean squat in February. I remember one year, 2018, when Dawg fans were crying the blues in early April because the Dawgs recruiting class was in the 50s somewhere and one of its star gets thus far was a 3-star DB named Wildgoose (who ended up at Wisconsin and turned out to be a pretty fair player). The posters on the recruiting thread were asking what the hell is wrong with Georgia recruiting? Many were asking if Kirby and staff had lost their touch after being beat in OT the previous year in the Natty. Guess what. Recruits started snapping like popcorn over the summer and early Fall and the Dawgs ended up with the #1 class in the composite rankings that year. Many didn't see that coming, and the result illustrates well that early rankings really don't mean a whole lot.

Yeah I agree Jon--that's nuts and makes me wonder if these guys know what the hell they are doing. Florida actually has a tougher schedule than Georgia but I think there are few if any power-4 teams that would gladly trade schedules with the Dawgs. Also, as for the pickup TE from Stanford, he is a grad transfer I believe but will not graduate until May in Palo Alto. So he misses Spring practice, and it is hard to know how big a contributor he will be coming into a TE room that is stacked with talent, even after the exit of Brock Bowers. The kid looks like a very good football player however.

Well I have become a Niner fan again after my return from 42 years in Georgia in 2015. I thought that they played a decent game tonight overall but got beat in crunch time by the current best big game QB there is. That punt hitting the heel of the 49 player was a very bad break though, but we all know hat footballs can bounce funny. And he final nail in the coffin for this newly reminted Niner fan was that the game winner was caught by former Dawg Mecole Hardman who attended high school about 20 miles from the tiny hamlet (Royston) where I lived in Georgia. Happy for Mecole though.

This flip was a very strange one. Among Georgia's commits, Dylan was the lead recruiter and cheerleader. He helped, I am led to believe, in flipping his 5-star safety/WR teammate K.J. Bolden from Florida State to Georgia and constantly encouraged others to come play with him in Athens. His dad was an All American lineman at Nebraska in the 90s and is uncle is the current Offensive line coach in Lincoln. This is a case, I believe, in which Dylan was pressed upon to take one for the family perhaps sweetened by NIL and the prospect of playing much earlier than he could have behind Carson Beck and Gunnar Stockton in Athens. Was he happy about it? Well despite the commitment statement , almost certainly written by his Dad or the Nebraska Sports Information Office, we get a clue from his commitment photo decked out in Husker gear in which he looks shell shocked and anything but happy. Herbie, of course denies that he encouraged the Raiola family to induce Dylan to flip from Georgia to Nebraska and said on the Paul Finebaum program that it would have been crazy for him to do so. I don't know what went down and it really doesn't matter at this point what happened. Georgia is hardly forlorn as they also signed top-10 QB, Ryan Puglisi, in this class, a kid who is already impressing the Georgia coaches and teammates with his work ethic (they already knew he had an other-worldly arm).I just wish more helicopter parents would let kids follow their own inclinations as these are the kids' lives and their desires are important. If Dylan really decided, on a day he was to move into his dorm in Athens and begin bowl practices, that he REALLY wanted to be a Husker, more power to him, and good sportsmanship permits me to wish him well. He's a kid so I'll wish him well anyway. As for Herbie, he is welcome to his opinions but should never, as an allegedly neutral journalist, try to influence a kid's commitment decision, if, in fact, that is what actually happened. That is my opinion and I'm sticking with it.

Yeah they lost Raiola but already had another high 4-Star QB coming in who is already turning heads in voluntary workouts with the receivers. Said to have an even stronger arm than Raiola, so no one is crying over the team's misfortune. I've come to trust Kirby Smart to always have some kind of acceptable contingency plan for just about any eventuality.

Boy it sure is interesting to look now at Tray Scott's first couple of years in Athens. He had recruiting misses on the two highest profile DLs in the state and faced calls for his firing at his misses. Then he recruited a couple of lesser luminaries, Davanta Wyatt and Jordan Davis, and turned them into first-round NFL draft choices. Add Trayvon Walker, Nolan Smith, and Jaylen Carter to that exalted list and now recruits are eager to meet the guy and hear his pitch.

When you have a great class, you tout it, and it is always nice to have a great one than one that is pretty average. OSU always has great recruiting classes and does a pretty fair job of developing recruits who choose to stick around. But they haven't got over the hump to snatch the brass ring for many years now (of course the same could be said of Georgia until recently). Development of talent is paramount! Rhule at Nebraska is a very good coach and I have commented before that I expect him to make the Huskers respectable again. But with the roster he has at present (including the incomers) I think it is far to much to expect a talented Freshman QB like Raiola to lead them within sniffing distance of the promised land. I think that they will be lucky to keep the kid on his feet if they try to start him as a first-year QB in the B1G. Had he stayed at Georgia, he'd received virtually no first-team reps as a Freshman behind Carson Beck (but that's not the major reason he transferred).

I will simply caution (again) to all the star gazers out there that star ratings only matter if the players holding the honors have their heads screwed on right and can get developed in their new homes. Certain schools in recent years have looked like the Milky Way for all their talent without accomplishing much between the lines---which is really all that matters. Notable examples of underachievers IMHO are T$M and the U in Miami in recent years. There will be more such examples, but I am not terribly worried at this point that Oregon will be one of them. If properly evaluated, talent is the lifeblood of success But that success is not pre-ordained.

I think the 3/4 placements above reflect the suppositions that Utah will win the Big-12 and FSU the ACC and, hence will enjoy a Bye week. Yet even with a bye, both these teams will be extremely vulnerable IMHO in the coming second round matchups. But what do I know? As we have not had a 12-team playoff with Bye teams, maybe the Bye is more advantageous than I think it is. The biggest advantage I can see at this point is giving the Bye teams an extra week to get more fully healthy for the games to come. I don't want to sound like Cryin Day here, but I sure wish there had been a week between the last regular season game and the SEC championship game last December. Both Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey played for Georgia, valiantly limping around all over the field doing their best to help their team, but they were far from themselves that day. At the end of a tough season time to heal could be tremendously important to a team's fortunes. Sorry to get off track here from the point of the thread. Just free associating in the late evening I guess.

My father-in-law, who was a big Dallas Cowboy fan, had an interesting take on Neon. I used to call him the world's biggest hot dog. He liked that characterization and coined a new nickname for him: Mustard. Interestingly, all his many friends knew of whom he spoke when first hearing Dad's characterization for the first time, and they started using it themselves.