mikethehiker

Highway robbery for Michigan in plain sight! That was a high crime and know one will bat an eye, because it’s over. Have we turned into soccer where officials keep a secret time and only they know when the game time expires?

On Offense: -I'm excited to see Evan Stewart back healthy along with a healthy DAK. Injuries have sunk our last two playoff runs and entire defenses should have to game plan around one of these guys, but both along with McClellan? This could be Oregon's best group of receivers top to bottom ever! -OLine cohesiveness. I don't expect perfection against a talented Bronco team, but I don't want to see a repeat of 2 years ago. On Defense: -Inside Linebacker Instincts. Our ILB strengths have been speed and pass coverage. We will have a new defensive "QB's" this year. Our defensive line should occupy everyone up front to keep the ILB's clean. How well can they "sniff out" plays? Do they have the natural instincts to carry us deep into the playoffs? -3rd down. Can we get off the field? Madsen is a veteran QB, so this will be a solid Game 1 test for our defense. -Safeties. I think we're all looking forward to the debut of Koi Perich, but how about Carl Williams IV coming over from Baylor along with 5-star phenoms Trey McNutt (injured last year) and Jett Washington? Will they make immediate impacts this year? Special Teams: -Making field goals. Please let us have a solid kicker this year!! -Punt Returner 1. Who gets the gig? I hold my breath on every punt catch. This player has the most trusted hands on the team.

Oregon 31-7 1 Turnover 2 Sacks 234 passing yards

The only teams we lose to are the eventual national champions. That's us this year - finally!! 12-0, 16-0 B1G Champs and National Champions!! Win NCG 16-13. 41.0 ppg on offense. 11.1 ppg on defense. Presumes O-Line comes together again, linebackers are big playmakers, and the kicker comes through.

Bright side: good timing and hope he's 100% by mid-season or earlier. Not so bright side: the fact that this is reaggravated eight months later doesn't bode well for the rest of this year and possibly longer. How do you teach a bull not to run like a bull? Praying Jordon gets a clean bill of health soon!

Remember, this is the year the SEC starts playing nine conference games. Instead of playing New Mexico State, UAB, or Chattanooga, you just won a trip to Texas A&M or a home visit from Georgia. There are going to be a lot more 3, 4, and 5 loss SEC teams that will drop out of the rankings. This is the year, SEC finally starts looking like the B1G, old-PAC12, and Big12. Last year, the SEC had seven teams with 2 or less losses. I estimate that number drops to 4-5 teams with 2 losses or fewer. Another interesting side note: last year, the SEC had only 2 teams win their last game of the season. ACC (7), BIG12 (6), and B1G (8) all fared much better in the postseason.

Oh no, why did you bring up kicking? I haven't thought about kicking in a long time. Please let us have reliable kickers!

This is a fun exercise. If restricted to the list, DAT would be thrilling but our greatest need is proven QB play in Mariota. His mobility is also light years ahead of Moore's. If we could go back and grab ANY player, our greatest need is LB and I would swoop up Kiko Alonso as the #1 person who could provide the biggest impact to this 2026 roster.

What if every school refused to play Texas Tech? No conspiracies. No lawsuits. Just refuse to play. I’m shocked that their own fan base isn’t lighting up the phones and email servers with deep concerns, especially with a player who has never played a down and has no loyalty to Texas Tech. I would like to believe that if this was an Oregon player, our fan base would not tolerate this. This should be an easy decision for TT. Take the high road and be the hero. However, they likely already knew all of this before they signed him.

I wish for a significant step forward for Dante Moore. Yes, O-Line struggled against elite defenders and elite schemes last year, but Dante has got to have better recognition of where the pressure is coming from or where his guy is struggling. I wish for more audibles at the line of scrimmage. I wish for reduced average time to get the ball out. I wish for more throws over the middle of the field and up the seams. And I wish for perfect health across the board, so we are finally at full strength throughout the playoffs.

I have not watched an NBA game in years, but follow from a far distance. I will not watch until home teams wear white uniforms again and these sissy's quit sitting out games and tanking. What a rip-off for the fans! The play-in for the last two playoff spots in each conference (usually with sub .500 teams) is absolutely ridiculous and the first round should have stayed at best of five. The Trailblazers will never lure a star to Portland to win a title. And the tattoos...it's all just unwatchable. Yes, I'm fun at parties 🤣

One could only hope this is a complete, designed roster rebuild.

A long and insightful article on ESPN from a couple days ago. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/48123438/college-football-transfer-portal-tampering-how-works-crosses-line. We all know college football recruiting, contracts, and NIL are unregulated chaos right now, but the article really shines a light on the slimy realities of this 'business'. Is this really what college football fans want to cheer for on Saturdays? I know we would all answer that a little differently. Props to Dabo Swinney if he really is trying to hold the line. I feel like transfers sitting out a year would help curb a lot of this activity. Here are some excerpts: Coaches have griped for years about the out-of-control nature of tampering across college football. But this was a rarity: A head coach [Swinney] going public with precisely how his program was wronged. And not just any coach, but one with two national title rings. He laid out the story of Luke Ferrelli, a transfer linebacker from Cal who had just enrolled at his school, moved into an apartment and went through classes and workouts for a week. And then, suddenly, he bailed for more money at Ole Miss. "Right is right even if nobody does it," Swinney said. "And wrong is wrong even if everybody does it." But now that players have agents, impermissible contact has dramatically escalated. "The tampering got much more brash and blatant," one agent said. "I don't even see why schools get mad about it," one agent said. "If you don't want your kid to be tampered with, sign them to an agreement that's fair and the kid won't be looking to go elsewhere." "You almost have to tamper at times with these schools, because they don't want to pay their own players," the same agent argued. "They just don't." According to agents, the easy way to facilitate December tampering was via three-way phone calls. The agent would call the GM or coach, then add the player to the call. That way, it's the agent showing up in phone logs and not the player. Some even held these pre-portal agent meetings over FaceTime and Zoom. "They'd done three-way calls with their coaches for four different clients as early as November," the agent said. "He's up there waxing poetic about how bad tampering is, and I've been helping you tamper for a month." Swinney and other coaches have likened the renegotiation process to extortion in some cases and know they're contending with agents who could be bluffing about offers from other schools. But that's how it works when there's no data or transparency about how much college football players are earning. "Once the kid gets on campus, that s--- has got to stop," an SEC GM said. "To me, that was the cardinal sin in that situation." "He's literally in class," an agent added. "There's no way to defend it." One ACC GM felt the Ferrelli move was nowhere near as troubling as Miami swiping star quarterback Darian Mensah from Duke at the portal deadline. The Hurricanes' last-minute push to flip Mensah away from the ACC champs resulted in Duke suing the quarterback and settling for an undisclosed sum to release him from his two-year contract. "It's like they robbed a bank in broad daylight, walked out with no mask and no alarms went off," the ACC GM said with a chuckle. One month after Swinney's news conference, NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan sent a memo to member schools warning that his group has been charged with pursuing "significant penalties" for tampering violations -- including any contact between agents and coaches about players who are not in the portal. He vowed work is underway to modernize and streamline the investigative process for more expedited resolutions. "Simply put, communicating with an agent for a student-athlete who is not in the transfer portal is a tampering violation," Duncan wrote. GMs surveyed by ESPN said they haven't turned in other programs for tampering in recent years because they view it as a waste of time. It's not easy to obtain evidence and prove it like Swinney did. More importantly, staffers don't want the NCAA imaging their phones and finding proof of their own tampering efforts. "Nobody's clean -- except maybe Dabo," the Group of 5 GM said. After years of perceived investigative inaction, GMs and agents say they'll believe a reckoning is coming when they see it. "I hate to say it," one agent argued, "but the rules are a suggestion at this point." "Let's say they do penalize Ole Miss or one of these teams," an SEC GM added. "At the end of the day, it's still going to end up in a courtroom." Tampering has become so easy to do that trying to stop it might be futile. Perhaps it's wiser to confront some of the contributing factors such as fixing the calendar, regulating agents or dealing with the schools who are spending far beyond the revenue sharing cap. "It's like trying to stop a runaway train, man," an ACC GM said.

Is this Altman's last game? OBD are down 12-33 at halftime against Maryland. We are 3 of 22 from the floor (all 3 makes from Bittle) and we're being outrebounded 26-14. Altman deserves a glorious send off in front of the home crowd, but I don't see any indications that next year gets better.

Agree on the obvious dilemma created by a conference with too many teams, but divisions could make matters worse by locking in the schedule imbalance year after year. At least the current situation allows the imbalance to rotate around. I have no sympathy for this topic. Each school is raking in cash no matter the schedule or the results. Unbalanced schedules is a 100% predictable result of having too many teams in one conference.