Just watched this Fox40 interview of Caden Pinnick … he’s a 3 sport athlete (football, basketball, baseball) and wants to play all 3 in college. Is that even possible? Would Les consider something like that?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SbbGNUxkUaY

Last year’s results showed us that the committee doesn’t give you much credit for “quality losses” (we weren’t even one of the first 4 out despite only having losses to FBS and top 10 teams). Seems like number of losses is more important than whom the losses were to.

Would it be better to be a Sac State with 4 losses to Montana, MSU, Idaho, and UCD OR a UCD with 3 losses to Montana, EWU, and NAU? That Stanford win will be doing all the heavy lifting if we beat Sac and they still get in over us.

I said this in another thread but I think the wildcard will be Montana’s AD being on the committee. No doubt he watched his team play both Causeway teams and of course we fared better against the Griz than the Hornets did.

We’d have a better overall record than sac state too because FBS losses are thrown out. So 7-3 vs. 7-4 and we would have the head-to-head. The only way Sac gets in over us in that situation is if the FBS win is given more weight than our record and H2H win. But it’s also possible that neither 7 win team gets in — will probably largely depend on how many other teams are on the bubble.

I don’t know how the NAU/EWU affects us given that we lost to both teams.

In 2018 we must have benefited from having the Montana AD on the selection committee. He probably attended UCD’s rout of his Griz in Missoula … it’s a safe bet to assume that our performance in that game had something to do with us getting seeded despite having been blown out by EWU 2 weeks before the selection committee met.

The Montana AD is one of the 2023 selection committee members so I’m hoping that our one touchdown loss to the Griz + Sac’s blowout loss to them both factor prominently in his mind if it comes down to choosing only one of the Causeway teams to enter the field.

We would have the better record (UCD's 7-3, not counting the Oregon State loss, vs. Sac's 7-4, counting the Stanford win) and the head-to-head. They would have one or two quality wins (Stanford + maybe Nichols State) and we would have one quality win (Sac). All their losses would be to playoff teams or playoff eligible teams (the 3 Big Sky leaders + UCD), whereas our losses would be 1 playoff team and 2 mid-tier Big Sky teams. So it really could go either way. Let's just win and worry about all this on Selection Sunday.

Every season has that moment where you realize this might just not be the year. In 2019 that was the Montana game.

What hurt the most about that were the sky high expectations we all had following the previous year. In 2018 that moment of realization did not occur until the last minute of the quarterfinal game vs. EWU...

Half a century of Aggie Pride! That’s amazing.

I forgot about this. Does that mean we'll probably see Mascheratti this year?

What's the point of doing a hurry up 1 min offense to end the half if you don't use your last time out to take a shot at the end zone?

Wasn’t Boise State ranked 4 or 5 when we played them? We hung with them for most of the game, too.

It didn't take long for someone to suggest an 11 team D-1 "California Conference"

https://www.bakersfield.com/opinion/joe-mathews-the-california-conference/article_bda6504a-3d74-11ee-b154-07109aa0afdb.html

I’m sympathetic to the arguments about football not being as big in West Coast culture compared to Montana or the South. Having said that, Sac State has basically the same cultural environment and apparently is drawing an average of 15k per game. So while I’m under no delusion that we’ll one day draw 25k like in Montana or Texas, 15k should be a realistic goal for us.

I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, but I don’t think we should let the outcome of Causeway or selection Sunday create such dramatic concerns. Has Sac State grown as a program? Of course. Haven’t we also? Absolutely. At the end of the day, I would take Hawkins over Taylor in a heartbeat purely for the intangibles that honestly have nothing to do with football. The fact that he understands Aggie Pride, his philosophy on coaching, hearing him gush with pride a couple years ago over the fact that the entire OL was engineering or science majors, etc. It’s the little things you notice: I forget who it was, but one of the players during a Monday presser this season said he had FBS offers but UCD was the only school that allowed him to pursue an engineering major. I do think Taylor is a better on-the-field coach but I wouldn’t trade that for what Hawkins brings to the program and university.

And on the subject of Sac State’s progress vs. ours, here’s some counterpoints to hopefully make us feel better when we play the comparison game:

Causeway as a metric: Both teams were in this game. There’s nothing about losing by 6 points in the last second of the game that screams “Sac State is clearly on the better trajectory.”

Playoff selection as a metric: We can’t let a handful of lazy ADs sitting on the selection committee define the season (let alone our trajectory as a program) for us. It of course sucks we didn’t get in but everyone on this board (and many on AGS) understand the nuances between our 6-5 and Sac State’s 11-0. Swap schedules and both teams likely would have gotten in. Admittedly the difference between their season and ours is they found a way to win their close games and we didn’t (although we didn’t have the benefit of a cheap targeting hit taking out the opponent’s QB or Weber State’s long snapper handing the game away) — I think that says more about coaching (and the Hawkinses can still improve here) than it does about our overall trajectory.

Season win/loss records as a metric: I alluded to this above, but it’s a little unfair to compare the two programs’ trajectory based on (and draw conclusions from) their wildly different 2022 campaigns. Not only was our schedule much more challenging in terms of the teams we played, but I also think it would have made a world of difference if the scheduling gods gave us even one of those games (MSU/WSU/SDSU) later in the season. It would have given us more time for our offense to click before these games. Our FG kicking, which was the difference in SDSU and WSU, dramatically improved later in the season. Playing the tough teams later in the season would have also helped the rankings situation even if we still lost those games. Starting 1-4 is too big of a hole to climb out of in terms of national recognition in the polls. If you rearrange our schedule and we start 5-1 only to go 1-4 in the last 5 games, we would have been a top 10 team losing to 4 teams in the top 10 and likely still staying in the top 15/20 by selection Sunday (basically Montana’s season). Who knows if that would have made a difference to the playoff committee but at the very least we wouldn’t have felt as much like an underdog in Causeway. Sac State’s 2022 season is the inverse of this experience… they played Montana when UM was still highly ranked, they got WSU later in the season when the wildcats were on their decline and their offense was clicking, and of course they just had fewer quality opponents to play.

Attendance as a metric: Yes, Hornet Stadium drew 23k people on Saturday. But that's because both teams have been successful, and it was the highest stakes Causeway in the history of the series. That says just as much UCD as a program as it does about Sac State given how close the two schools are and how many fans in blue attended on Saturday. If we throw game day experience into this metric, I would say UCD Health Stadium is way ahead of Hornet Stadium... parking was a nightmare and I missed the first half because of the massive line to get in.

Playoff performance as a metric: In an alternate universe, the line judge stopped the clock to move the chains and we threw a TD in the last second of the game to win (not too far fetched). We actually make it into the playoff field. This Sac/UCD comparison doesn’t happen until after both teams finish their playoff runs and probably has a much different tone. In our actual universe however, even when we do this analysis now, UCD is arguably leading in this metric for actually winning one of its games and almost making it to the semifinals. So there's that.

Bottom line: I know we finished 6-5 and they finished 11-0, and I'm sure this has many implications including national/regional recognition, recruiting, retention, etc. But I don't think things are as dire as the different outcomes suggest, once you dive a little deeper into what happened this season or even what's happening to the programs overall. In my opinion, Hawkins is the right coach for the kind of program most of us want this program to be, and remembering that helps me come to terms with an otherwise disappointing end to the season.

“3. Montana has good buddies on the committee.“

Montana is literally ON the committee. Their AD is a member through 2024.

Montana AD being on the committee probably didn’t hurt…

UT Martin needed the coin flip. Both SEMO and UTM would have gotten in if UTM won the coin flip, but since SEMO won UTM will likely be left out.

Burning 10 seconds trying to do some fancy and dangerous laterals at the 2 yard line with 48 seconds left also didn’t really help…

yes the winner of that game went to Sac State. It could happen again this year too if we get in

No I think after the seeds the rest of the field is determined based on geography (with the home team being the one that has a higher $$ bid)

It would also make Montana that much less likely to get in, and the committee is much more likely to give the Big Sky 4-5 spots (and it’s hard to see Idaho getting in with UCD being left out) instead of 6.