Wait, I thought it was Husky stadium? I guess fans feel differently.

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Cole Hocker was recently named Indoor Male Athlete of the year...

For you track fans, here's s video showing why.

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Your team might be in, they might be out but here is the last chance to play the Rivals Beat The Experts Tourney Pick 'Em for a chance to win a free subscription:

Is he Cali-flock potential, or is Orgon just on the list ... interested fans want to know.

Don’t miss out on this year’s Yahoo Fantasy Tourney Pick’em contest! It’s free to play and there will be over 10,000 prizes, including a top prize of $10K + Vegas Getaway. Create your bracket now and invite your friends to play.

http://yhoo.it/rivalstourney

How long will some of the top names in the south hold off? Those on this list had commitment dates locked in, or a timeline in mind, but have now put things on hold or pushed them back.

It will not be easy. Shout they beat No. 10 seeded VCU they will likely face No. 2 seed Iowa. Then No. 3 Kansas after that? If they make the Final Four, they will certainly have earned it.

Just some thoughts about OL and what next year looks like (hearing good things about four freshmen OL; two true freshmen and two redshirt guys).

Also some recruiting thoughts as we get closer to official visits happening.

First round of tournament. Will get Iowa in 2nd if they win most likely

A dive inside of #Rivals100 OL Kevin Banks' top eight, which includes major pushes from both in-state schools, a hometown connection out-of-state and a few head coaches getting more involved

More on Banks + what's ahead in his decision-making process: https://n.rivals.com/news/inside-rivals100-ot-kelvin-banks-top-eight

Iowa has a `1st team big guy. Ouch, if they get that far. Zags have 3 on AP teams....

Major takeaways out of @AllAmericaGame Dallas camp includes notes on some standout performers, including outstanding OL/DL battles + more on recruits from East Texas, The Boot and Oklahoma

STORY: https://n.rivals.com/news/takeaways-from-under-armour-dallas

Nice article today describing in detail Pritchard's more limited, but vital role going forward with healthy Smart and Walker. Can't wait to see this in a full stadium! But when?

I think that she might be giving herself a little bit too much credit but it is still a good video
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Very interesting...

https://www.oregonlive.com/recruiti...ves-oregon-ducks-basketball-offer-report.html

The first postseason run for Oregon women's basketball under Kelly Graves ended against South Dakota. The Ducks hope their next extended postseason stay begins against those same Coyotes.

Five years after South Dakota beat visiting Oregon in the semifinals of the WNIT, the Ducks will face the Coyotes in the opening round of this year's NCAA Tournament in San Antonio. The UO women received a No. 6 seed Monday in the tournament's Alamo Region, and will face the 11th-seeded Coyotes next Monday (7 p.m., ESPN2).

"I'm really proud of this group," UO coach Kelly Graves said following the selection show. "What a crazy ride it's been. But they earned this, and now we've got to go down and do some work in San Antonio."

The Ducks followed their 2016 WNIT appearance by reaching the NCAA Tournament's Elite Eight in both 2017 and 2018, then making it to the Final Four in 2019. It's been a roller-coaster ride since, given the loss of some generational players, not to mention the pandemic that canceled last year's tournament.

But Oregon has endured — two of that 2019 tournament's No. 1 seeds, Notre Dame and Mississippi State, aren't even in this year's field of 64, but the Ducks are.

"It's really special, especially for the upperclassmen," UO senior Erin Boley said. "For Lydia (Giomi) and I, this being our last go-round, to be able to do that with this new team and new group, it's very special."

The 2020-21 season has been defined by youth and injuries for the Ducks, not to mention adjustments to the schedule due to the pandemic. The team still figures to be without point guard Te-Hina Paopao as the tournament opens, Graves said, but there's been a chance to mentally reset since a loss in the Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinals.

That defeat, at the hands of rival Oregon State, was the fifth in six games for Oregon. In the nearly two weeks since, the Ducks took a couple days off to clear their heads, then returned to practice reinvigorated, players said.

"Right after the tournament, we obviously went home a little defeated," freshman post Nyara Sabally said. "We decided to step away from it for a couple of days, and I think everyone needed that. But we knew when we got back in the gym it was go time.

"We've had a couple really good days of practice. Now it's time to go to San Antonio and do our thing."

The No. 6 seed is Oregon's lowest since 2017, when the Ducks were seeded 10th before upsetting Temple, Maryland and Duke on the way to the Elite Eight. This year's team hopes to conjure that same magic.

"Nothing else matters except for how well you're playing when the tournament starts," Boley said. "It's completely wide open, and it could be anyone depending on who's hot and who's playing well at the time.

"It feels like a new chapter. It's a new opportunity for us to go out and play together."

South Dakota enters the tournament at 19-5, having won the Horizon League tournament for their third straight NCAA Tournament berth. The Coyotes are one of the most efficient offensive teams in the country, averaging 75.3 points per game while committing an average of 11.2 turnovers, fifth-fewest in the country.

With a victory, Oregon could potentially face No. 3 seed Georgia in the second round, and then No. 2 seed Louisville in the Sweet Sixteen. Pac-12 champion Stanford is the top seed in the Ducks' region.

The Ducks and Cardinal are two of six Pac-12 teams in the field. The Mercado Region includes No. 3 seed Arizona and No. 9 seed Washington State, and the Hemisfair Region includes No. 3 seed UCLA and No. 8 seed Oregon State.

"I don't think a lot of people expect us to do a lot," Graves said. "But a good team — and I do think we're a good team — with nothing to lose is a dangerous team. And we're going in with that attitude."

Some of the recruiting buzz from @AllAmericaGame's Dallas camp stop and it's jam-packed

Yes Sir!!



Who can become college football's next superpower?

One could easily make the case that, as with the UEFA Champions League in soccer, the creation of the College Football Playoff took a sport already defined by its haves-versus-have-nots divisions and increased them.
Of 28 CFP bids handed out in seven years, 20 have gone to four schools: Alabama (six), Clemson (six), Oklahoma (four) and Ohio State (four). They've won 22 conference titles between them in that span, leaving even other well-run programs -- the Georgias and Notre Dames and, briefly, LSUs of the world -- to forage for scraps.
The top four in 2021's SP+ projections? Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State. They could be the top four in the preseason AP poll as well. If they aren't, it's because Georgia butted ahead of one of them, but that wouldn't be much of a sign of parity. After all, the Dawgs reached a CFP final (in the 2017 season), have established maybe the highest level of recruiting outside of Tuscaloosa and have finished in the AP top 10 for four straight years. A have-not, they are not.
This isn't exactly the 1970s, when nine schools accounted for 69 of 80 spots in the year-end AP polls, but it's not far off. And it becomes easy to forget that one of the names in the current list of dominant forces is a newbie of sorts.
At the end of 2014, Dabo Swinney's Clemson was regarded as one of a few programs on the rise. The Tigers had won double-digit games for four straight seasons and had squeezed out a top-10 finish, the program's first in 23 years, in 2013. They had signed a blue-chip quarterback in Deshaun Watson, who looked the part when given the chance, but he had torn his ACL at the end of 2014. AP voters cautiously started the Tigers 12th in 2015, two spots behind three-time defending ACC champ Florida State.
They ignited in 2015, of course, reaching the national title game, then winning it the next season. They've gone 79-7 over the past six years, ranking No. 1 in the AP poll at least briefly each year and making six consecutive CFPs. Watson was the first of many five-star quarterbacks signed by Swinney, who invested heavily in his pool of assistants, raised the program's overall recruiting game (Clemson averaged 8.0 ESPN 300 signees from 2011 to 2014 and 14.3 from 2018 to 2021) and slowly built a purple-and-orange ACC Death Star. The Tigers had won two league titles from 1989 to 2014; they've now won six in a row.
While so much of this sport is dominated by the same schools that have always been members of the oligarchy -- Alabama, Ohio State and Oklahoma were on the 1970s blue bloods list, too, after all -- Clemson followed a script that technically anyone with power conference money, an invested fan base and good, old-fashioned commitment can follow: make a good hire, support that hire, win a little bit, recruit better and better, win more and more.
Just because almost no one actually pulls this off doesn't mean no one else can. And someone else will at some point.

Who might that 'someone' be?
To begin answering that, let's first digress and return to a topic I brought up in October, as one of a few potential New Clemsons was getting its season underway. Granted, that piece proved my unlimited jinxing powers -- Penn State, the subject of the piece, proceeded to start its 2020 season with five losses -- but within that piece I laid out what I hoped was an interesting new way of looking at the sport.




While recruiting has indeed picked up for Clemson through the years, Swinney's Tigers broke through without signing quite as many blue-chippers as other national powers. They made a few more big plays and shored up their special teams a bit, but the biggest gains were made in the key plays department. Over the past six seasons, teams have gained an average of at least 9.5 points per game from key plays only 16 times -- Clemson has done it five times, and the other 129 FBS teams have combined for 11.
The Tigers won the national championship game over Alabama in 2019 almost entirely because of those key-play situations -- they won 19 of the game's 28 third downs (they were 10-for-15, Bama 4-for-13) and four of seven fourth downs, and not including an end-of-game kneel-down possession, they scored 37 points in six scoring opportunities while Alabama scored just 16 in six. Toss in a pick-six, and that's how you win by 28 while creating the same number of scoring chances as your opponent.
That was a particularly extreme example -- even the best third-down and red zone teams can't accomplish that often, and applying extra value to a small sample of plays in an already small-sample sport can be fraught. Still, situational football is a real thing, and Clemson has leveraged games with elite play in these situations for a long time. Those numbers aren't flukes.
Which teams are closest to club membership? To take into account both Clemson's on-field improvement and its solid recruiting in the time leading up to 2015's breakthrough, let's look at the 12 programs that have both (a) averaged at least six ESPN 300 signees per season and (b) generated at least a 0.600 win percentage over the past three years.



1. Georgia Bulldogs

2. Notre Dame Fighting Irish

3. Oregon Ducks
Here are the teams that signed more ESPN 300 prospects than Oregon in the 2021 class: Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State. Mario Cristobal is wrecking shop in the recruiting department, but that's only one of two reasons why the Ducks rank this highly. The other? They're in the Pac-12, the only conference not currently monopolized by one of the four powers this piece is built around.
The Pac-12 could have incredible depth in 2021, with most teams returning a vast majority of the brief 2020 season's production. But there's no slam-dunk national title contender, and the first program that can go from good to potentially elite could reap long-term dividends. Washington and USC have high amounts of potential, too, and I'm fascinated by what Arizona State's offense might be capable of this fall. But while an unclear quarterback situation could hold the Ducks back in the short term, whenever Cristobal and offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead get the QB situation squared away, said signal-caller is going to be supported by blue-chippers in virtually every unit on the two-deep. I still give the Ducks the long-term edge here due to potential and recent recruiting.
4. Penn State Nittany Lions

5. LSU Tigers