We don't have to start rooting for the Broncos now, do we?

Those guys are great. But how about let's not punt so much in the future? :chin:

Sad for us, but super happy for him. Hope he gets PT and makes an impact.

Every year until now there's activity on the athletic department website, lots of videos, tweets, etc. This year, crickets? I'm just a former player turned fan and of course defer to Coach in how to run the program, but this is unsettling to a fan.

Only two signees? Something's going on here...

@agalum I don't know. I enjoy Sac State losing as much as the next Aggie, but if we can slay the EWU dragon, and Sac beats PSU, 2021 could be the highest stakes Causeway Classic I can think of.

It's "prove it" time. Feels like the team that beat Tulsa was playing better than the team that just beat NAU. Maybe I'm just old and cranky.

I think Versus has it right. We have not looked good since the ISU game. Good record, but EWU and Sac are going to be tough.

Doesn't Cal Poly know we're 15 point favorites?

This conference shakes my understanding of reality every week.

@aggie08 I agree with you, but also believe this is an unrealistic dream. Would be some great potential rivalries with Reno and Fresno (own the Valley), but to say this is an uphill battle is an understatement. Great home attendance so far this year, but student interest seems to fade as the year goes on. Not sure if it's just the level of competition, the type of students UCD attracts, or maybe generational apathy (Cal and Stanford student apathy should be a warning). It would be critical to own the Sacramento market and draw fans from there (Sacramento is more football crazy than Berkely and Palo Alto). That is a lot of money to hope for "if you build it, they will come." I'd love to see it, and would rather see Boise State than Northern Colorado, but not going to get my hopes up.

I took from this that a college football coach can't have it all, unless he were coaching at UCD in the 1970s-2000s. Really a good read if you can get the full article.

A good quote from the article...

"My first thing after I get some clarity is, why didn’t somebody tell me this? That’s how I see my role moving forward. Maybe I can just share some of that and help people. But here’s the crazy thing. When I decided, ‘OK, I’m gonna coach and I’m not going to be a psychologist. I’m going to go coach at UC Davis.’ I finished my Master’s and I’m coaching there along the way. Then, I’m thinking that this is more me than the other thing. I think OK, if I’m going to coach, I need to leave UC Davis and my coaches there, and I call them game-changing coaches. They were so far ahead of their time 30 years ago — Jim Sochor, Bob Foster and Bob Biggs and all those guys that stayed there forever — how they treated us, using the platform of football. I got it being around those guys. But, here was my mindset: If I’m gonna do this — coach football—I need to leave Davis. I don’t want to stay at Davis my whole career for these guys. Paul Hackett was the gold standard at Davis. My coaches were like, ‘Paul Hackett, Paul Hackett, Paul Hackett,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I want to be Paul Hackett.’

They make the connection and I go talk to Paul Hackett at Pittsburgh. Here’s the irony. Paul Hackett is a Davis guy that played for these coaches, probably 20 years before I did. He had ’em on the younger end, I have these coaches when they’re on the older end. I do the interview with him, and we’re talking and he goes, ‘So tell me, why do you want to leave Davis?’ I said, ‘Well, Coach, I decided that I want to get into coaching. I want to be the best of the best. Iron sharpens iron, and I want to get in the fast lane, and I want to try to compete for national championships.’ Something along those lines. He looks at me, and Paul Hackett had been around, he’d been in the NFL and with Bill Walsh. He goes, ‘You’re going to be leaving the best place that you’re going to ever coach in your career in terms of the balance and quality of life that you can have, and how you can win there, the kids you can recruit there and living in Davis, California.’ He goes, ‘I’ve been around, and it’ll never be better.’ I looked at him because I didn’t even really know what he was talking about, and I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t care about that.’ He just laughed and shook his head. ‘You’re just like the rest of us. ‘"

Sure link is below, but it's behind a paywall, so you'd need a subscription to read it. I highly recommend a subscription though; great group of writers. https://theathletic.com/2576778/2021/05/11/chris-petersen-reflects-on-the-busyness-the-imbalance-and-the-out-of-control-recruiting-grind-of-college-football/?article_source=search&search_query=petersen

@lucche I totally agree with you, however, we view athletics through a UCD lens. Here, although we still want to compete at the highest level, athletics is part of the process of educating the entire person, and there are lessons students just can't learn in any other part of campus life. But we are a bit unique - academically minded students, high graduation rates, strong student-athlete outcomes. It's more difficult to make the same argument at schools with lower graduation rates, where athletes are treated like mercenaries. Even worse at a program like EWU where low TV and ticket revenue make the economic argument quite difficult. While I disagree with EWU's faculty that athletics should be cut or reduced, many of their points are valid.

Woah - competition level in CA FCS just got super-charged. I hope i's a rising tide that raises all ships.

I think rating high school players is highly subjective, and tend to be skeptical. But, for what it's worth Hero Sports rates our 2019 recruiting class as #48 in the country https://herosports.com/fcs/football-2019-recruiting-top-50-fcs-teams-rankings-ajaj compared to our 2018 class, which Hero Sports ranked # 17.

I was just kidding around/wishful thinking, now you boys are going to get my hopes up. Maybe setup a nice hammock next to the new practice fields for him to relax in.

He can relax while serving as Dan's OC, like in the old Boise State days. :up:

That's really funny - mirror image team? Or mirror image fan base?