A couple Oregon players made our list: https://portal.rivals.com/news/ranking-the-pac-12-s-top-transfer-portal-additions-for-2022

Gabriel with the coverage from practice today ...

From On3's list of NIL collectives. Eugene NIL Club allows fans to get in on the action. Seems like a good idea, since the cat has long been out of the bag. I'll be chipping in. Apparently, Taki Taimani just tweeted about it urging support.

Oregon (Eugene NIL Club)

Founders: Bailey O’Sullivan, Mick Assaf
The buzz: The Eugene NIL Club is a player-led collective. The Eugene NIL Club joins groups like Michigan State’s East Lansing NIL Club, Auburn’s Plains NIL Club, Arkansas’ Fayetteville NIL Club and Kansas State’s Manhattan NIL Club and many more which are setting off a new era of collectives in college sports. However, unlike other YOKE-supported clubs, The Eugene NIL Club allows fans to donate directly to financially support 75-plus Oregon football players and “join the ultimate fan experience” through online communities and digital events with players. Participating players will split the proceeds equally. The players partner with YOKE, a platform that offers business tools to athletes to allow them to launch a paywalled community. This provides fans a way to engage with Oregon athletes throughout the season via an online membership. NIL experts are not surprised by players making a move to have a seat at the table. The move also gives student-athletes the opportunity to have the cash funnel directly to them.

Hard to fault him for this. NW is a prestigious institution and he was at Univ of Chicago prior to UO so this seems to be an opportunity for him to return to his roots.

All I know is tomorrow? Ideas?

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Yesterday at a Starbucks, I met a man and woman. The woman wore a Michigan shirt and the man wore a Stanford shirt.
They had both gone to Michigan as undergraduates, and to Stanford for grad school.

The guy told me that he loved Michigan football. They had both grown up in Michigan and had been Michigan fans all through childhood.

I commented that Michigan games were considerably bigger deals than Stanford games. He didn’t complete agree, and responded that the Stanford fans have more fun.

How weird …. Fun? Doesn’t he know that being a college football fan is far too important an undertaking to be thought of as being about fun?

Right here:

Good story here from Gabriel about Sam "Taki" Taimani's physical transformation since arriving at Oregon, his role in the locker room and how the team has rallied together through the Spencer Webb tragedy.

From Jacob:

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Four-star defensive tackle Edric Hill has released his top six this evening and Oregon has made the cut alongside USC, Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma and Missouri. The North Kansas City standout recruit has over two dozen offers on the table, so this is a significant cut. Alabama has been viewed as the leader up to this point, but Oregon certainly made him an early priority. He visited with the Ducks back in January. He took official visits to Alabama, LSU and USC in June.

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From Rivals basketball recruiting director Rob Cassidy:

FSU is going to be tough here but Oregon right there:

PERHAPS ANSWERING MY OWN QUESTIONS:

SORRY ABOUT THE PRESENTATION OF THIS ARTICLE...


INDIANAPOLIS -- Just as it looked like College Football Playoff expansion was heading towards finality, conference realignment started by Texas and Oklahoma jumping to the SEC put the entire process on hold. Last month's meeting of the FBS commissioners in Park City, Utah, went so well that those who spent the last year battling over CFP expansion seem to be edging closer to settling on a format.
"We didn't solve anything, but we had a really good meeting," one of the participants at the gathering told CBS Sports. "I came out of that meeting pretty optimistic. Then, five days later, boom. I don't know what kind of effect we had on it. We had the best meeting we had in over a year."
That "boom" moment came June 30 when word leaked that USC and UCLA were joining the Big Ten. But even since then, commissioners have been optimistic about CFP expansion to the point that Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren recently expressed interest in a 16-team model.
"I do want to look at 16," Warren told CBS Sports at the Big Ten Media Days. "I want to look at all of them. I want to look at everything but four."

As proposed last year, a 12-team playoff would have included the six highest-ranked conference champions plus six at-large bids. Warren voted against that model because he wanted a guaranteed spot for the Big Ten champion.
(Spoiler alert: The Big Ten champion would have been a virtual lock to be among those top six conference champions every year.)
Warren was joined in that "no" vote by Pac-12 commissioner Georgia Kliavkoff and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips. At the time, passage required unanimous consent.

On Tuesday, Warren said he was "100%" in support of expansion. He then told The Athletic that he was "going to soften [his] stance" regarding the top six highest-ranked champions.
That may have something to do with the Big Ten and SEC being in the process of separating themselves from the rest of college football. It may also be the realization that, after the current CFP contract expires following the 2025 season, a unanimous vote will no longer be necessary to change the structure.
Mississippi State president Mark Keenum, chair of the CFP Board of Managers, said earlier this summer that he hoped the presidents would have expansion resolved by next summer. An expanded bracket would be in place for the 2026 season.

Last week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey indicated he would support a bracket including the best teams available regardless of whether they are conference champions. Sankey was part of a four-person subcommittee that took two years modeling everything from four- to 16-team playoffs before settling on the proposed 12-team format.
The sudden interest in 16 might best be explained by, "Why not?" Still, one high-profile industry called the idea "lunacy" saying Sankey's original subcommittee got it right at 12 teams.
A 12-team bracket is valued at approximately $1.2 billion annually, industry sources told CBS Sports.

Support for the 16-team bracket may have hatched while commissioners were in Park City for the annual Collegiate Commissioners Association meeting. Among those eligible to attend the meeting, only Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick was absent because of a previous commitment.
"I don't have a problem with 16," said Barry Alvarez, Big Ten senior advisor for football. I think we need more access. College football needs more access to the playoffs. It used to be every game was important. Now, you see people lose interest when someone loses a game early. Well, they're out of the playoff."
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, one of those expansion architects along with Sankey, explained that up to 30 teams would be in contention up until November if a 12-team bracket needed to be filled out.

Multiple sites report that ESPN is out of the BIG 10.

Reports say agreement with the BIG 10 is with FOX, NBC and CBS.

That would probably mean really good things for the PAC!

ESPN is gonna need programming.

We are not dead yet...

Gabriel said Lanning's interview wasn't especially noteworthy, but he captured the highlights of the day.

Latest practice interviews for you here including media sessions with OC Kenny Dillingham, Caleb Chapman, Patrick Herbert and Jackson Powers-Johnson after the fourth day of work for the Ducks.

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Really nice package here in today's Inside Reed column. Check it out!

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Is anyone frustrated that the goducks roster no longer lists players’ height and weight? It was always interesting to follow growth and development. Am I correct in assuming that it is now considered personally private information in the same vain as are medical records or IQ scores? Is it considered body shaming to list a human being’s weight as 340 lbs?

Jacob Hamre was out there today for us and will have a story coming afterward as Kenny Dillingham and players are made available. Here were the takeaways from the 20-minute media viewing window.

From Adam Gorney:

This is crazy. I bet they wish they had fired Kelly. USC getting all the love, but esp with UCLA's recent "favored status," this is all they got going? Still time to change, but many of the best players are off the board.