Undone

Coach on McAfee again? Nice. Trying to figure out how to catch that on the webz.

Serious comment: that static chin-up hold where he then holds the medicine ball between his legs is some pretty cool training. I know this strength & conditioning staff mixes in some less traditional methods alongside the traditional weightlifting methods and I think that makes a lot of sense for the skill players. Excited to see how some of those things show up for year 2 as well.

I see. Agreed there. Yeah I wasn't insinuating he should be fired if the performance wasn't hugely better than last year. Was just saying that I don't think there's any excuse for the unit to not at least be better than we were last year.

There was probably some kind of misunderstanding with what you replied to in your first paragraph here. I read it twice but I still can't understand what you thought I was saying. With good coaching and improvement we should have a serviceable offensive line this season that helps our team score more points per game than last season.

Mission: accomplished. Just killing time until the season starts. The bold is actually a really good response to my somewhat aggressive statement towards Bonner, that is a really great example. And we all know that when you have a tight end like Mark Andrews out there what the answer is; he has the size advantage, the receiving advantage, and the blocking advantage. And you went on to talk about that. It's more about tipping off what we're going to do as floridacorn said, but it's also about weighing athletic talent advantage and X's & O's advantages. But hey, maybe Bonner lit it up in spring ball catching the rock? Rhule has talked about how much he likes the 49ers' offense and Satterfield likes the big guys. I just want to see our team opening up the field this season, getting teams spread out and on their heels. I'll be pumped no matter how we accomplish that, if we're able.

I specifically remember taking s*** here for making this comment at this point in the calendar last year, so I'll make it again: There are no excuses for Donovan Raiola this year whatsoever. Yes, he's Dylan's uncle and that part has clearly been huge for the program and probably huge for his retention. If he's a good offensive line coach then this group continues to make improvement. If they don't, then it's an indictment. It just can't be as hard as our program has made it out to be with the offensive line in the past 5-ish years.

Great comments from @brophog and @floridacorn, as always. My original comment was intentionally brief to get some discussion going. This was the train of thought: Let's say Raiola is capable of slinging the rock on a level greater than that of true freshman Adrian Martinez. If that is the case, it is my opinion that it is inadvisable to run a ton of 12 & 22 man stuff if you have good wide receiver talent at your disposal. So if you're in 11 man personnel where Fidone is your tight end and you've got one running back, would you really expect Bonner to be your slot guy all that much? I ask in earnest. Because you've got - not necessarily in this order but I mean maybe roughly - Banks, Coleman, Neyor, Lloyd. You'd take Bonner over two of those four guys in 11 man? Not disparaging, just creating discussion. This comes back to my original assertion that we might wind up doing s*** just for the sake of doing it - something that is in my opinion potentially a squarely "Marcus Satterfield-eque" thing to do. I don't really care about "being multiple" if the top playmakers aren't out on the field as much as they could be. We will need some really incredible QB play to leverage that level of X's & O's to gain an advantage.

Do we really need Bonner as a slot receiver, or is this just another fetish type thing Satterfield has for hybrid type players?

Yep, agreed. Actually I'm not even really confident on "solid" if I'm being honest. The emphasis with this group has to be on ball security. After that, I'm just hoping we have one guy who can see any sort of a hole and hit that gap hard.

Good stuff. When you throw the quick, wide passes to the sideline to a tall receiver who can just take a couple of burst steps and get four yards and you do it over and over again it really helps also. It seems like that's what we're going to do. Hopefully it doesn't get too predictable. As you said, pre-snap spacing is big. And it just can't be as hard as our program has made it.

I can see it now. A small corner of the edge of the field will be designated for growing three short rows of corn. It will be Dylan Raioloa's trademark celebration move to grab an ear off a stalk and husk it to the crowd's cheering roar. Then we will secure a $2.6B loan to build a state of the art facility that researches how we can get a competitive edge against our opponents with special, proprietary shoes that optimize performance on our grass field.

Bonner at QB. Alex Bullock at RB. Danny Kaelin at FB. FB trap with Kaelin.

"What kind of football does Colorado play?" "They play 'Daddy Ball.'"

Everything you said was the very point I was trying to make. I had originally said that I was worried about a true freshman QB. Then I thought about how well Adrian actually played his first year and then thought about how much more talented Raiola is heading into his first year, bolstering your argument that maybe Raiola being a true freshman isn't all much of a detriment to this team.

Those are some good discussion points, bro-man! I do think there are several great reasons to have a lot of confidence in Dylan. One spin-off discussion would be to look at Adrian's true freshman year. True freshman and he comes out with confidence and made some great throws and clutch plays all season. Just played off of instinct and gave it a full send. And just think about how much better Raiola is throwing the ball in all aspects than Adrian was heading into their respective first college games.

Should have won 10 games? I'm not quite getting that one. Although we didn't really know about Chubba's groin injury that he had apparently sustained during fall camp until down the stretch of the season, heading into last season it was pretty clear we didn't have a solid QB out of three guys we could field. We also didn't have a standout running back. Even in hindsight I can't say we should have won 10 when I look at how unbelievably terrible our QB play was. Special teams was even fairly shaky pretty much the entire season as well.

This is maybe now just turning into defining words and discussing semantics. I'd pretty confidently say though that this team cannot manage 10 wins this season. Not with a true freshman QB and also not without a truly standout RB.

I was referring to the culture of the team; the psyche and the unity and the degree to which these players actually care about winning. Wasn't referring to anything at all external to the players & coaches.

I like this, this lines up roughly with descriptions of win totals I'd give. I'd maybe change 8 from being "a relief" to being "pretty decent." There's enough talent to win 8 this year, even though it would maybe be asking a lot of Raiola to help get us to that point. But 8 is doable. I still think we need a pretty much complete culture overhaul to get to 8-9 in any season, but what I saw last year was that Rhule is very good in that department. Pretty sure I voted for 7 wins when this poll first popped up but if we struggle with turnovers again even that isn't going to happen.

"During the next test at the camp - taking a 5 iron to the kneecaps from John Daly - Höffken received one of the best scores of the week."

I think there's a chance that college football can continue to look like it has looked the past couple seasons for quite a few more years - maybe even longer. But it seems like that is dependent on there not being some new "NFL Minor League" being created. I'm sure there are investors already thinking about doing it. It's a question of whether they could actually pull enough athletes away from the college game. The way they'd do it is of course by offering them considerably more money than what they'll be paid when the dust settles on this latest NCAA court case and the revenue sharing model is defined.

Agree on run/pass ratio being way over-analyzed by both analysts and fans. Making a big jump in first down effectiveness would maybe give us our biggest boost. It does seem like what we'll do is kind of act like we're lining up in a big, boring bunch set to do a RB handoff, but then we'll motion the big guys way out wide and then create a quick read situation for Raiola. It'll probably not be all that heavy on the "R" in RPO; I think the read a lot of times might wind up being whether to quickly throw it to a first-read outside tall guy for a little screen play, or whether to look back inside/down the field for a man. We have got to figure out how to spread defenses out, it's just not even an argument. Spread them out, thin them out - whatever language we want to use. And it's not just that we've struggled to field a good passing QB that has held us back from doing this, it's also about play design & scheme. And with all of the resources we have and the head of steam Rhule is building I think it's just flat out dumb if we can't excel at our play design & scheme heading into this season. Just no excuse.

Figured this is as good of a place to talk about this as any. I think because the passing game was so terrible last year coupled with how big the news was of signing Raiola, I feel like the majority of the offensive discussion has been about what our passing game will be like this year. But I'm wondering what the running game looks like. We actually ranked 34th in the country in rushing yards per game. But the most obvious thing to talk about there is probably how much of those yards were put up by our QB's.

Is it proposed to be $22M annually, or 22% of the athletic department's total revenue?