Good stuff from the OC today.

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Caught up with Avalos today to review Stanford and the upcoming WSU game.

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Caught up with Coach Cristobal today for a Q&A.

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For those of you keeping track of these guys...

I'm going to get this started a little early. Brandon is in the booth and I'm sure Scott will be there soon. Already some big news for the game with three key Stanford players out.

Read 'em and weep.

Cal, a below average PAC 12 track program, will be walking off with Milesplit’s top ranked short sprint recruit in the country. David Foster, of the Houston area, has an all condition PR of 10.29. Milesplit ranks David the 8th best boy’s track and field recruit in the country.
If you wonder why I’m posting this, it is simply because it is so A typical of Cal to sign a top sprinter, especially from out of state. I’d love to see him going to Oregon, but it is good to get him in the conference.

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We will be seeing official early commitments for all sports but football.
It will be exciting for all sports. As for Track and Field, I am certain that there will be signees that we don’t know about.

Track will get signers trickling in all year right up to the first day of school next Fall, but this will be the biggest day. The international students seem to announce later, but we’ll see if anything happens on that front Wednesday. Rest assured, there will be many great internationals signing with Oregon before recruiting is all done.

I set the game to record then watched something else, but when I came back to the game it was interrupted by the same show I just watched! Who knew, lol. Anyway, in case I'm not the only one, here's the full game. There's a bunch of highlight replays too.

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According to Milesplit, Katrina Wright from San Diego CA has committed to Oregon. Katrina won the California high school girls Championship in the 400m as a sophomore with the fastest time that year in the state, 53.93. That was the 29th fastest high school girls 400m time in the US that season. She was only a sophomore.

This is a strong pick up. We can’t rank her 5 stars without times from last year ( due to Covid-19). However, to be tops in a state as big as California in her sophomore season is an indication that she might have the makings of a 5 star talent.

My favorite event is the 4X400 relay. Hopefully Katrina will play an important future role on the Oregon women’s 4X400 team.

Here they are today.

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I am going to release our Roundtable score predictions later this morning. I made mine in this article earlier in the week. What you got?

Up by one spot in the AP, up two spots in the coaches' poll.

OPENING REMARKS

DAVID SHAW: Our team gave a great effort as we should, but we didn’t come up here to give a great effort, we came up here to find a way to win. There were some very good performances, but overall I think we could’ve played much better. We were missing some of our starters, tough to find that out a couple hours before the game, but once again coaches made adjustments. Thankfully, we didn’t have to adjust too many things. Jack West stepped in as starting quarterback and run our operation. Jack has had a fire in his belly since the game last year against UCLA. He’s a talented, high character, young man, that was determined to go out there and play much better than he did last year and I think that he ran the operation very well, threw the ball accurately, made some big plays, made some great decisions, shame of it is we had multiple opportunities. In the passing game in particular, we had 4 or 5 chances for guys to make plays and we have to connect, its a problem with not having the starting quarterback absolutely, but still we practiced and the guys that practiced together, and we have to be able to connect. Thought we ran the ball better this game than we did any game last year. Give a lot of credit to Coach Carberry, Drew Dalman, but really hoping these young guys grow and play at a higher level. Excited about our young backs, two sophomores, a junior got some runs today. Excited about our freshman backs that are also on our team, but we ran the ball fairly well. Much better than last year and we hope that continues. I guess we didn’t really come up here to give a great effort, we came up here, we think we have a good enough team to beat good football teams. We didn’t get enough things to go our way and I’m gonna put that on our shoulders to do that.

Q: Can you break down for us the work of Coach Carberry, the work go offensive line to get better, the work of the running backs and how in your eyes it culminates the night?

DAVID SHAW: There’s and old coaching saying that I believe and we believe very strongly here that the biggest jump you make as a player is between year one and year 2. So that was 5 guys you mentioned today. 3 starters on the offensive line, including the fourth who rotated in, so we really played 4 sophomores on the offensive line and our 2 sophomore running backs. They made huge jumps; they are all bigger, faster, stronger than they were a year ago. They are a lot more confident and knowledgable of what to do. They played with a lot of confidence in the running game and the passing game. Pass protection was better than solid, I thought we played good against a really good front. 2 running backs caught the ball in the backfield really well. Austin Jones made a couple of really good catch and runs. They ran the ball between the tackles and the edges very well, which is what we want to do. Really proud of that group and the work they put in. Challenged our entire coaching staff, particularly the run game. Coach Carberry and Morgan Turner, to really narrow down exactly what we want to get good at. And at the same time, we also knew that I, nobody else but me, last year I really cut down the things we were doing. I just couldn’t do a lot with three freshmen. I thought it was unfair to them to out too much pressure on them, but this year you see the variety we have back in our game. Inside zone, outside zone, some pin and pull schemes. Our guys were able to handle more so we are able to put more on those guys. We trust our run game, coaches to put those guys in position, and the amount of work put in by the coaching staff to change their bodies. There’s a picture I have of my little group of plays on my desktop of computer of our starting offensive line last year and with three freshmen out there. And you
look at those three guys right now and they look completely different. That’s what we do here, we know how to get our guys ready to go. I anticipate us being one of the better offensive lines over the next couple years.

Q: Based on your first impression live, what was Coach Moorhead able to do in the second half to beat the defense that had stood pretty well in the first half?

DAVID SHAW: Well they got good players, we believe we got speed in our secondary and we got beat three times by the deep ball. You get beat three times on the deep ball, it’s tough to comeback. When you don’t make enough plays on the offensive side when you have your opportunities and we gave them three, that’s tough. They broke out a couple of runs, they did a really good job and what I know about Coach Moorhead, I never met him and actually wanted to meet him today and didn’t get the chance to meet him, is that he wants to run the football. Their coaching staff wants to run the football and they stuck with it. We did a really good job in the first half and the second half they found a couple of creases, they cracked a couple of runs, they got multiple good running backs, and they cracked them. When you give up a few explosive plays and you don’t make enough on your side, the scored gets lopsided.

Q: Coach, obviously it was a tough day at the office for Jet, just curious, is there anything that we don’t know that went into his struggles today or anything that particularly surprised you about how that worked out for him?

DAVID SHAW: It was very surprising, we have a lot of faith and confidence in Jet. He had an outstanding training camp coming off a major injury and he has worked his tail off to get back to where he is. Pregame wise, he hit a couple 54 yard field goals and was feeling great and then just having the misses was very uncharacteristic and our entire team, our entire coaching staff, has a lot of faith and belief in Jet for the work he has put in. You can imagine having a difficult injury and how hard he’s worked to come back and be ready to play has been phenomenal to watch. He had a bad day today. Sometimes you just say I had a bad day.

Is he talented? Absolutely. Is he gonna bounce back? You better believe it. And are we going to give him opportunities again? Yes we are. He’s our guy, we know how good and talented he is. He’s worked hard to get to where he is right now and we believe he is gonna bounce back.

Here is our post game Fifth Quarter Analysis of the Stanford game:

Such a shame Bryce isn't able to OV here. I truly believe it would have sealed the deal. Here is an interview with him from SI.

"COVID has kind of hurt my recruitment a little bit," he said. "I was hoping to get my five official visits, that was really gonna be the main deciding factor on which school I really wanted to go to. Sadly, we don't get those official visits anymore.

"But I think I'm still gonna make the right decision at the end. I've been to most of those schools quite a bit. The only one I hadn't been to was Oregon a lot, that really hurt. Oregon is kind of my dream school ever since I was a kid. It was the school I wanted to learn more about, go there a little more."

Like most, Foster has shifted his evaluation strategy towards committing to one program over the other four on December 18.

"As time goes on I think a picture has shaped in my head a little more," he said. "I'm still not 100% on any of the schools yet. What I ended up doing over COVID was make a little datasheet. I put all the five schools, I put things that I wanted and rated them 1 through 5. Every day there was a different school being number one, two, all the way through.

"It's made me realize what I really need to focus on and what I wanted to know more of. So I've been asking those questions since...it's been the main thing helping me paint that picture in my head."

SIAA's curiosity with the datasheet began with the categories to rank, to which the first the senior mentioned should not come as a large surprise given the nature of the position he plays.

"One of 'em was food," he said with a laugh. "Gotta know how the food is. Coachability, how many guys they've sent to the NFL? How's their track program? Who their throwing coaches have produced and their numbers. I've talked to a few of the players and wanted to know their true feelings on why they chose that place to get a feel for the environment there."

Click the link below for the full article