last minute change of plans.

2 bench back seats, level c, section f

email me: lanway@gmail.com

go bears!!

It’s about bloody time. No more evaluations, assessments, opinions, hopes, or dreads based on thin evidence. This has felt like the longest offseason ever. It’s finally time for some real hitting and some real football. Finally!

Go Bears!

A weekly feature we'll run every Friday

“With all due respect to the Aggies teams of the past, I think this is the best Aggie team in the history of Aggie football,” Hawkins said in a media session on campus as his club prepares for its opener at Cal on Saturday. “We have more quality players up and down our roster than we’ve had here in the Division I era.

8th in the pac-12. This includes transfers.

Fan bases of College Programs

Just below Arizona!?!? We suck with young people so the sucking of our FB team over the last decade has not endeared them to the Cal Student base! Hopefully our location and academic prestige carry to us to the Big10 promise land. Yes, we will take a starting 50% payout increasing over 5 years! Where do we sign!

Kunaszyk makes the browns
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Cameron Goode and Chase Garbers both cut.

Elijah Hicks and Tonges make the cut for the best NFL team in all the land AKA the Chicago Bears who will win the Super Bowl.

Anyone else on the bubble we were paying attn to?

Lynch pulls off a miracle just before the 53 cut deadline to give the 49ers an option to Lance if he flames out with rookie jitters or gets whacked while exhibiting his considerable running skills

simple poll ... blind response.

Good matchup breakdown here from Jesse:

The first couple videos are up. I'll add the rest in as they appear:

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Thoughts?

This is a weekly piece I'll be writing all season.


Jesse has the matchup breakdown coming tomorrow.

Wilcox, Sirmon, Musgrave, Plummer and a couple other players will be available over Zoom on Tuesday. Jesse and I will both be writing stories from those sessions. And then Wilcox, assistants and players are available Wednesday. That's the media schedule. We'll have content flowing every day. Excited to get the season going!

My interview from Friday:

“It’s significant. It’s a topic that’s being discussed in every recruiting discussion right now. Understandably so. I think we’re going to have more information before signing day. So some of those things should be able to clear themselves up.”

Recruiting has always been a challenging business, but the process is now crowded by other evolving issues.

“It’s changed a lot,” Wilcox said. “Any one of these changes — whether it’s what’s happening with the conferences or the transfer portal or NIL — any one of those things within a given year would have been massive.

Rough first half for Idaho State. UNLV dominating. Bad special teams have followed him.

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Cal jumps into the recruitment of Chandler (Ariz.) Hamilton safety Genesis Smith with an offer today. The 6-foot-2 prospect already has previously released his final four of Arizona, Washington, Oregon State and Iowa State but has yet to make a decision meaning the door is open for other schools to come in and make a move. With Arizona being his lone official visit in June the thought has been that he will ultimately commit to the Wildcats, but he has not yet made that move. There had been some behind-the-scenes conversations about him being a silent commit for that program, but adding an offer from Cal certainly makes that seem less likely since the conversation tends to go in both directions when that happens this late in the process. Either way, he is someone who could fit in well with a number of programs. I do think there will be an opening for the Bears to make a move and he has four more official visits remaining that he can use during the fall. He had planned to make a decision before the start of his senior season, but that just doesn't seem likely at this stage.

I'd expect Cal to make a move for him now that it has offered. He planned to take an official visit to Washington in the summer, but that didn't happen. So far Arizona and UW have been to two top contenders in his recruitment.

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Normal caveats that I'm not a scout, I was sitting ground-level in the endzone, etc. My observations are just what I saw, not a thorough evaluation.

The bad: It was not what I expected. Salinas barely got the ball to him, despite the fact that Clayton Valley wasn't doing anything special to stop him. They seemingly ran two plays the whole night: inside zone to the RB or QB keeper, and WR screen. Maddeningly, they barely looked Hunter's way. 7 must have caught 8-10, and by my count, Hunter only had 2 catches. Maybe I missed a touch or two. Hunter didn't look like he ran crisp routes or gave much effort when the play wasn't going towards him, which was basically every play. Despite being significantly bigger than the corner one him, he put minimal effort into blocking.

The good: Hunter was clearly the class of the game with the ball in his hands. He turned a well-covered screen into a 15 yard gain. He returned a kickoff the the opponent's 40 and didn't look like he was running hard. But the unbelievable play was a horribly thrown pass to the flat that should have been picked. Hunter snatched it out of the air with no momentum going forward, took two steps, and was absolutely gone down the sideline for ~70 yards. His acceleration is off the charts, at least compared to the players in this game. Clayton Valley is a pretty good team, the hardest matchup Salinas will have according to max preps, and there was no one who was close to his athletic match.

These are just my very amateur impressions while watching the game with some colleagues who aren't big fans, so take them with a grain of salt. Overall, I saw a very talented athlete who could have put in more effort down-to-down.