The guy who was most surprising judging by spring camp reporting was Julian Fernandez. Be interesting to see how he develops. As a HS prospect he looked like a guy whose athleticism hadn’t caught up with his size. Now a short year later he was making plays and 40 pounds heavier.

The Davis defense is always going to be suspect until they put together a dominant year. They usually are in the upper third of Big Sky defenses, but not at the top, and they slipped some last year. They averaged yielding 30 points a game, Now they lose some major contributors like Psyk, Riddick, Rutchena, Stanley, Batson. They were victims of an inordinate number of injuries, but pundits aren’t going to look past last years stats completely despite the Connors twins.

In the NIL rules what is given has to have some relation to the value of the athlete’s name image and likeness. Is Pinnicks endorsement worth a new truck to a dealer? It might be if he starts and stars. Is it worth a loaner truck, probably. The NCAA reviews NIL deals now. Pinnick probably got some revenue sharing too which the school can do whatever they want with.

The primary source is 247sports.com . They rate players on a scale that goes to 100, based on their in house evaluation. 98 -100 are five stars, 90-97 are four stars.
3 stars are players rated 80 - 89, and vary a lot in perceived quality, Davis very rarely gets any in the top half of 3 stars.

https://247sports.com/article/247sports-football-recruiting-rankings-what-the-ratings-mean-when-they-are-released-what-matters-who-is-on-the-team--81574/

That makes sense. I’ve noticed this year that somethings changed. There are guys who apparently have a lot of offers including lesser FBS schools, but no stars.

I’ve only paid attention to college recruiting for a few years, inspired by your lists, but thats long enough to be skeptical about HS player rankings. Some of our best recruits have been highly rated, while some other highly rated players never play. The ratings are too influenced by whether a player has pro dimensions, which very weakly correlates to college performance. Whichever QB Plough choses is going to have the spotlight and they’re both redshirt freshmen, so have a good shot at freshmen awards.

These two guys have a print Big Sky preview at at FCS Football Central
In this podcast they say Ty Richardson had a learning curve when in fact he missed games 4 thru 9 because of injury.
The number of players who played 200 snaps obscures the fact that Davis’ defense lost 5 of the 6 top tacklers from last season.

We’ve got Sac as a test case, let’s see how changing categories impacts Sacs attendance. Ohio, Kent State, Massachusetts and Toledo are their home conference games. Their two contests with directional schools are road games.

I'm agnostic on whether to move up. If Davis can't draw fans and viewers from Sacramento they shouldn't, but thats an open question to me, maybe someone knows where ticket buyers and media viewers live.

Davis is about half the size of Fort Collins but many times more people live within 30 miles of Davis. If Davis just draws from the city of Davis, then they should stay where they are. College football teams usually can draw from a region.

They've got most of the better teams.represented I.e. teams that have appeared in various top 25 pre-season lists
I've seen more mention of Idaho State as a ranked team this year than Idaho. Southern Utah might deserve having a game.

He is rated 85 on 247. That's about as high as we get. But only about half the recruits at that 3+ level live up to expectations. But he is a versatile player.

Parker Johnson (PJ) class of 2026 who played for two different high schools in 2025, announced he committed to Davis a few weeks ago. This was mentioned in the 2026 preview thread.
Team hasn’t confirmed that to my knowledge. Apparently had multiple FBS offers, but ended up without a home.

The Davis run defense was really good in 2005 Stanford averaged 2.5 yards per carry on 30 attempts. NDSU rushed for 3 yards on 23 carries. #10 ranked Cal Poly gained 50 yards on 33 carries. I miss the shut down run defense we had in that era.

These are from the 2024 season and Stony Brook went from 0-10 in 2023 to 8-4 in 2024

None of the 24 million sac is committed to includes items that improve to quality of the team. More scholarships more.coaches, better facilities, revenue sharing are in addition.

“I think the challenge now is in the marketplace of Division I athletics with NIL (name, image and likeness monetization rights for college athletes), and all the other needs that you have to be competitive at an FBS level, those are also revenue opportunities, fundraising opportunities that we’re chasing as well.“

An expense is labeled a revenue opportunity. No wonder they are hopeful, they’ve got lots of expenses.

I'm.curious what Sac spent on in 2024, which was before they really went crazy with NIL, and coaches salaries.

I don't know if the 3.5 million for "staff" is an average of their members or a requirement. I looked at the Nevada coaches and they have perhaps 18 to Davis' 12, it's hard to compare because of different roles. While it makes sense to expand the staff, and increase pay, more than tripling Davis' coaching expenditure seem like it would not be necessary to put a good product on the field.

There are no commitments in the 2027 class, and the offers are mostly in competition with the usual Mountain West, Ivys, service academies, big sky.. Looks typical