spartan2785

Can you imagine putting that up on your wall of honor or whatever it is Auburn has to remember their award winners...ridiculous, and embarrassing to even think that you could claim a piece of it.

Not saying you shouldn't do what you do! Your enthusiasm is contagious, it's great to see optimism, I guess I'm just guarding myself against disappointment. I think we'll be improved, just not an elite defense, I'll be more than happy if we can be in that 20-40 ranking range.

It is perfectly fair to be skeptical that the defense will make a huge improvement, it has been the case for many years that the Oregon defense gets hyped up about the improvements that will be made, and then it ends up being very mediocre for a top 25 team. Until I see it with my own eyes, I will not believe that we will be a shut down defense just based on the hype of incoming transfers or freshmen.

Huskies still have a transfer from Miss St. who had over a 1,000 yards, I think they'll be okay there. The starting guard is probably a bigger loss.

I remember there was a lot of concern that Oregon was in a bad spot after last year with the student chants in the BYU game about Mormons. Good for him, good for the Ducks, but I won't really think about it until after his mission, happens a ton where a guy decides to go somewhere else after that amount of time away from the game.

I'll be concerned until I see it in a real game, I've seen this story before about how the defense will be super improved only to be disappointed. Not saying we won't be improved, but Oregon's defense tends to get hyped up only to see us fall a bit short of what everyone was saying. I still remember the hype around Sewell/Flowe, and that did not turn out nearly as well as everyone was predicting. Popo a good player, needs to prove he can stay healthy, other guys need to fulfill their potential (Burch). No shame in saying that, they have potential, now go out and prove it with results, not hype.

I was thinking about posting a topic on this, I just couldn't believe that a coach would say if one player fights we all fight, actively encouraging escalating brawls instead of diffusing the situation. I know he is trying to build camaraderie in the team, but all this does is excuse players getting throw out of games for "standing up for themselves and teammates". It's what leads to undisciplined teams that kill themselves with penalties. One of the things that really pisses me off about Deion, is that he acts like he was some tough guy. The reality is he was supreme athlete who had ungodly cover skills, but was scared of contact and was at best an average tackler who would rather avoid actually squaring up whenever he could.

That's a bit high I think, there is no way I would go that high considering the way we looked on defense last year, no.`8-10 I could see, I think we're more in that 12 range a bit higher than 15 but not that much of a leap. The USC love is just so disgusting, it's a team that had an insane turnover margin that will most likely be at least halved, and it's still the same coordinator that hasn't had a legit defense in years. This is all with the easiest schedule that there was for conference play last year.

I really hope we can improve, but I'm hesitant to start believing again considering the player types that have been brought in as transfers, they don't shore up the obvious need for shooters, we might have a rough awakening when we join the league, especially when you consider the amount of travel we're going to have now, I wouldn't be surprised to see our non-football sports take a step back as they adjust to the increased travel.

The permanent opponents question is interesting since you could end up with really unbalanced schedules for certain teams, for instance you could have a team like Wisconsin where their permanent opponents are Minnesota, Illinois, and let's say Iowa, meanwhile Michigan St. gets Penn St., Michigan, and Ohio St., not exactly balanced. The Boise St. games are 2 home games for Oregon for one game in Boise, it's not ideal, but out here it's not that uncommon to see some of those Mountain West teams get an away game from a P12 team, only teams that I can think of that basically never schedule those games are USC, mostly because they usually have Notre Dame and another power 5 team.

Our OOC schedule I'm guessing is pretty up in the air at this point, the B1G might allow us to get away with our FCS opponents for a couple years, but I'm pretty sure they have a policy that you can't schedule these anymore, and we still don't know exactly how many conference games we're going to have. I'm sure we will have to pay schools if we decide to cancel future games, we had multiple games against B1G opponents that now are going to be canceled as OOC games. It will be interesting to see what we do. I wouldn't be surprised to see us back out of games against Boise St. if that means we get to play OSU instead. I'm not even sure what sort of strategy we're going to employ since our conference schedule might be more difficult now.

I wouldn't like to see Autzen get too big, it's not like we've been selling out every game consistently for the past few years, maybe there might be more interest, or we could see about the same level. Nothing is worse than when you have a decent game where you can see a ton of seats unfilled. Students have to show up better as well, you see a lot of seats unfilled and then empty early.

To be fair to Oram, I don't think he is saying that Oregon killed the Pac-12, he's just saying it's a consequence of all the terrible decisions made over the past 20 years, and that greed is the number one driving force in college sports now. I think he's closer to how everyone feels about this, that it's not a fun thing that has happened but that Oregon and Washington had to do this in order not to be among those left behind like OSU and WSU. The whole situation just sucks that the university presidents, Pac12 officials/leadership, and the media corps encouraged this with their actions and hubris. In an ideal world, OSU and WSU go to the Big12 since those fan bases actually care about sports unlike the bay area schools who could care less for the most part and are a major reason for why we got to this point.

Yes and no, the way to a conference title is most likely harder, but we are also probably going to get more credit for the wins that we do have. We will have a bigger chance being a 10-2 non conference title team getting in than in the Pac-12, but the road to 10-2 might be harder. A bit of a chicken and the egg scenario I think.

Yeah, the gap between the B1G and the P12 was never really that big, the only difference really was a strong tOSU that was better than most of our best teams, when you begin to look at Wiscy, Iowa, Penn St., Michigan (most of the past 15 years), it was never really that far off the Utah, Oregon, Stanford, or UW teams of the past 15 years. The bigger difference was more perception from attendance numbers / TV numbers, that inflate the look of those teams, it's hard to feel like a big boy program when half the stadium is empty like in the case of the California teams or the Arizona teams. Line play is not going to be a problem for Oregon, we've had consistently some of the best lines in college football, and we will most likely continue to have good line play.

One thing that won't happen is games against FCS opponents since I believe the B1G has a no FCS games policy, I don't know how that affects the current games on the schedule against those teams.

Charles is doing yeoman's work right now with these updates! Thank you since it allows me to avoid X/twitter.

Part of me just wants to join the B10, just to spite USC. They get one season where they have the easiest schedule in the Pac10, have an insane TO margin that won't be sustain, and still can't close the deal, and now they think they can dictate who can join their new league. The amount of arrogance is incredible but believable considering who it is. I still maintain that our game against USC is going to be the most insane atmosphere that Autzen has ever seen, wouldn't be surprised if it's the best environment that college football has this upcoming season if both teams are undefeated.

I don't have any real hate for the Beavs, yes I know they hate us with the power of a thousand suns, but I have enough friends who are Beavers that I really feel horrible for them, they don't deserve this, same with Wazzu. It's especially frustrating when you think about how programs like Rutgers, Indiana or Purdue get to skate by with no real care in the world.

Kind of depends on if you're talking about simply productivity in college or are you talking about success in the NFL, if it's the latter than I would agree with the idea that Stanford probably eclipses Oregon. For as much success we have had churning out productive RBs in college, not many of our guys have had a world of success at the next level.

Miami has a lot of things that are go for it....and a lot of things that go against it. Their facilities have always been pretty crappy, they have no on-campus stadium, they have a ton of teams that they have to fight recruits for, Miami as a city can be a huge distraction for players, and in the end it has a history now of embarrassing losses and no real identity anymore in how it plays. They do have also have a lot of things that are plus, one of the best recruiting hotspots in the country, glitz of playing in Miami, it's still the U even those that are growing up today know it had a ton of glory years, facilities are improving. When I write this it really is obvious that everything around it is a two edged sword. They have a great recruiting base, but it makes them really reliant on South Florida. The glitz of Miami means it can attract recruits, but it also makes for a huge distraction. They can get coaches in, but the fan base has no patience since it's a professional sports fan base that has no real brand loyalty. It's not an easy place to win nowadays. You have to wonder the type of coach they'll be able to attract once they get rid of Cristobal.

I'll be interested to see who is available for us to schedule a game with if we go to this, it will be worth it if it allows us to play more games against power 5 opponents, but it will be worthless if we simply schedule more games against the Big Sky or Sun Belt caliber teams.

I like how they talked about how we go as Nix goes, as if they weren't completely reliant on Penix on offense, I mean COMPLETELY reliant on him. At least we have a ground game to keep us going, take away Penix and they're back to where they were the previous year.

It seems like a really crappy thing to do, you can easily have the same effect of showing that actions have consequences by telling the team that a player has been dismissed for violating team rules. You also do not leave a decision like this to the entire team, that just means you are passing off the decision to others when you are supposed to be the leader. What happens when a popular player does something that merits a dismissal but the team lets them back in just because he's well liked? It is a very slippery slope when you let so many people decide the outcome, you're the leader act like on. This is not to say that a coach shouldn't get the perspective of those around them, especially when it is not revolved around legal issues and instead around team rules. So talking to a leadership council is important, you might even let that group vote on it, but I just don't think an entire team should be voting on the future of a player. You're either headed towards a divide in the team, or you are going to end up really botching some decisions in the future.

When I look at USC's schedule I see three losses, they aren't beating the ducks in Autzen in the last game between those two teams for a long while, it's just not going to happen, that will be one of the loudest environments that we have seen for a while imo, Riley will have a Lloyd Carr experience I feel like being surprised at the sort of environment Oregon can produce in high profile matchup. I also see USC losing in South Bend, not to mention they still need to prove they can beat Utah. They're probably the most overhyped team in the nation right now. Last year they had the easiest schedule in the Pac-12 missing out on Washington and Oregon. Even with this they almost lost to Cal, Arizona, and UCLA. UCLA was decent, but there is no excuse for almost losing to Cal and Zona, especially Cal. They did this all the while having an insane turnover margin that is almost certainly not going to continue.