I don’t know the details of the scholarship limit. First I heard of it was Hawkins press conference last week. He mentioned it after the game also.

We definitely did have some bigger interior defensive linemen this year. Elsewhere not apparent progress.

They have more scholarships because scholarship limits waived due to Covid extra year. We didn’t utilize that hence our small recruiting class

he was moved to the “Rush” position which is basically a standup defensive lineman . I think he was a strong side linebacker when he had his impact year. Now he’s more frequently blocked by a offensive tackle rather than a tight end or back.

Regarding size in our lines, we had big nose guards/ defensive tackles but small or at least light defensive ends. The only defensive end with notable statistics is Ambagtsheer with four sacks and 22 tackles. If we consider the Rush position a defensive end, we got only half a sack all season from Eaton. Our linebackers are smallish for college football. Now that they’ve made targeting so commonly called, there aren’t many ways for our linebackers to legally stop a strong running back from getting yards after contact.
Our offensive line seems to want to be light and physically fit. Most actually lost a few pounds for this season, and weigh about what they did when recruited That’s great until we meet the bigger playoff teams and then we can’t handle them.

Suani played. Toki I only noticed on special teams, he is in the field goal unit.
Neither of those guys will quite give us what Rodgers does because they’re short.
I assume Babb quit and won’t be back wish it weren’t so.

That’s fine but when will we end the decades of being physically overmatched by the top teams? It was appealing back in the no scholarship era to watch undermanned teams compete through misdirection and screen passes. That’s not so entertaining 40 years later. We shouldn’t have to have a rare quarterback to be effective. Put Hastings on SDSUs lineup and he would have dominated. Put their guy on ours and he still loses. Defense same thing, against playoff level teams we get gashed. 10 yards a carry? Not many QBs will fix that. And we were dominated physically early in the game as soon as they started running.
The Eastern Washington head coach, Best, said they learned in the spring playoffs that they had to play bigger, and to play bigger they had to get bigger. That’s doubly true for us because we have never not been pushed around by Eastern Washington.

We lose two starting wide receivers, a starting tackle/guard a starting DT, a starting linebacker, a starting safety, and some sometimes starter reserves. Collectively that’s a lot of playing time.

We saw next to nothing of our class of 21 recruits, which was a small class.
Bryce Rodgers is going to be missed. Nobody similar in roster. Nobody like Harrell either that we’ve seen.

I think we need to change the way we develop offensive linemen. Some teams get big framed kids and they add a lot of weight. Colton Lamson is the only guy who plays for us who has followed that path. Everyone else is roughly the size they were recruited as.
We improved our run game at the end of the Biggs era with a proven offensive line coach brought in to assist Keane. We need to do something like that again.

Let’s see Gunnor!

Well I hope it’s SDSU because I’d hate to think we’d look this bad to a team Sac beats.

Hawkins said that one statistic he values is yards per carry. These guys averaging ten yards per carry. That can’t be overcome.

I think criticizing the quarterback is fine but we can see in this game that we lack the physicality we need at this level. Hastings could look ok with SDSU running attack.

I don’t think they are trying to develop Hastings, I suspect we’ll see someone else next year

Changing quarterbacks is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic

Thorpe has started every game since we started conference play. I don’t know what percentage of our plays are two tight ends and what percentage of those Thorpe is split out. I don’t think the two tight end bunched in formations have worked too well, they certainly didn’t against Sac. It’s one more thing that points to our offensive line not being good at run blocking that we resort to two tight ends so often.

On our bigger young wide receivers, Davis looked more athletic than I thought he was based on spot appearances In earlier games. Granfors was unable to catch some balls but he missed a lot of games and I think this was his first action in a while; since Dixie? Larison should get some time at wide receiver and Tompkins as well. Those guys can be deadly on screen plays.
Losing Harrell and Vaughn means losing deep threats. Any offensive players on roster as fast as Harrell or. Vaughn?

Hastings has been very good in two minute offense type situations. He throws a lot of short to medium sideline routes and is good at those.
Scott Barry kept referencing open space available in the middle in the Sac game, but it seems that when Hastings threw to the middle of the field it was into double coverage.
Hasting was not accurate on deep throws against Sac,

Take Weber’s team. Would they be ranked this year absent our beating them? Yes, and in the playoffs.
Things happen during a season, injuries and such. If you beat a team ranked at the time you played them, that counts. The committees have a different standard, for a different purpose.
Sorry if I imputed the savior thought to you.

But they were ranked when we played. You don’t go by rankings after you beat them, that tends to knock them out of the rankings.
In the 2010 decade we beat no ranked teams. And not for lack of opportunity.
I’m not arguing Maier wasn’t better than current crew, but he wouldn’t be a savior. A college quarterback needs more mobility than Maier., not to put up statistics but to beat top teams.

In three years he never won against a top 20 ranked opponent. At least we’ve done that this year.
If we’re looking into recent past rosters maybe we should take the other Jake from the 2017 team. He had a number of quality wins