Pac Ten Alley

I did a pretty thorough wrap up on Monday of what has been going on in Huskyland. One new piece of information is that are sports programs are doing well academically and will not face sanctions like WSU, and Idaho.

Just like any NCAA rule this one is beating up on the have nots, and not the haves. Taking scholarships away from WSU, and Idaho solves nothing at all. Do you really think athletes at Tennessee, and Georgia are taking academics more seriously than athletes at WSU and Idaho?

Pac Ten Alley

It is tough to be a Cougar fan today because they are losing eight football scholarships because of NCAA academic sanctions. This isn't exactly what Paul Wulff needs to start rebuilding the program.

Afternoon update - We're now out EIGHT scholarships. 22 for next year's signing class, 77 total. That makes us the worst in the BCS. Good thing we have so much outstanding depth, isn't it?? Looks like Idaho took stupid pills too, as they are also out eight scholies. WONDERFUL.

Ivan Maisel takes a look at the Bruins new coaching staff.

All Chow brought upstairs was a mechanical pencil and a handful of play sheets. He grabbed a Diet Coke from the little refrigerator in the booth when he arrived. In the two chairs to the left of Chow sat coaching interns Jake Peetz and Pat Girardi. To his right sat David Raih, who charted the play calls. Peetz and Raih are former walk-ons at Nebraska and Iowa, respectively. Girardi is a former co-captain at Columbia.The logistics of a new staff working in a new press box illustrate all the moving parts in a football team's engine. Coaches take for granted that the communication will go smoothly from press box to sideline. It's spring practice for the headsets, too. UCLA has new audio equipment. Chow couldn't hear the sideline. Then Girardi informed Chow that he and offensive line coach Bob Palcic were on different channels. Chow didn't take it well.

Washington has pulled ahead of Oregon State and is now nationally ranked and in the Pac Ten top three.

Recapping the Spring Game is still on the to-do list, but that will have to wait for now. After all, the countdown to football season is still in three figures. We'll have plenty of time to talk about the pigskin between Omaha and August 2. Heading into Pullman, the Beavers knew that the Cougars were a sweepable team. In other words, if OSU won series' against Arizona State and Arizona, a sweep against WSU couldn't be so hard. But that's when the game of baseball caught up to the back to back National Champions. After the Beavers dropped two games to Gonzaga earlier in the week, they dropped two straight to the Cougs- in blowout fashion. The Beavs lost 10-3 on Saturday, and 11-4 on Sunday. They salvaged a win on Monday, bombarding the Cougars with 19 runs on 17 hits for a final score of 19-9.

Nate Longshore is pencilled in as Cal's starting QB....but.... .

Nate Long-Shot? ... While Jeff Tedford continues to stress that incumbent Nate Longshore is his quarterback, a pec injury that curtailed his spring hasn't helped in his fight to hold off Kevin Riley. Riley moves better than Longshore and was flawless in his last game, a comeback win over Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl. Don't buy Tedford's smokescreen. Riley is closing the gap on Longshore all the time and might be ready to surpass him in August.

Jon Wilner takes a look at Stanford and the rest of the Pac Ten after Spring football.

If I could take one sentences to state the ridiculously obvious: The Pac-10 is a quarterback’s conference — always has been and always will be. When it has a first-rate array of quarterbacks, as it did in ‘07, the Pac-10 is one of the top conferences in the country. When it doesn’t have a first-rate array of quarterbacks, well, it’s a second-rate league (within the BCS grouping). And based on winter/spring developments from Tucson to Pullman, that very well might be the case in ‘08.

Scott Wolf inside USC.

USC lost four starters on its offensive line, but that's really not quite as dramatic as it sounds. Center Kris O'Dowd started the first three games as a true freshman until he injured his knee. Tackle Butch Lewis started in place of All-American Sam Baker and played respectable. Guard Zack Heberer started two games and tackle Charles Brown started one.

UA baseball is in contention

The University of Arizona baseball team is hoping to not only make a late push for a Pac-10 title, but to host a regional. The Wildcats could do both still. It will take a lot more wins down the stretch, and a few more fans coming out to the ballpark for a team that has won 12 straight to accomplish both.

The Ducks pick up a JC QB late which tells you that they are having a problem replacing Dixon.

Prize JC quarterback Jeremiah Masoli was snagged by the Ducks yesterday. He played for City College of San Francisco last year and led them to the junior college national title.

Pitchfork Nation has a nice lineup of everything going on Sun Devil this week.

Baseball dropped a game on the road to a mediocre Kansas State team last night. They try to rebound against a very formidable Wichita State team, who is looking for a big win to secure a spot hosting a regional.

Spring Round Up for BYU

BYU starting spring practice on March 17th and the Cougars who had consecutive 11-2 seasons and back to back Mountain West Conference titles, and now the Cougars are looking to make it to the BCS in 2008. The Cougars do not lose much offensively with frosh All-American Harvey Unga and QB Max Hall, plus multiple other key positions. The things that BYU needs to figure out in this spring ball is to find replacements for Bryan Kehl and Kelly Popinga at the linebacker position and also they need to find more depth and improve the secondary overall. The should be fine, because of the amazing job the coaching staff did when injuries really hurt that position with the Cougars playing 2nd and 3rd string players and still able to defeat Utah and UCLA.

Oklahoma fans are looking ahead to UW game.

Television and the kick-off time has been set for Oklahoma's trip to Seattle to play the Washington Huskies on September 13th. The game will air on ESPN and will kick-off, in prime time, at 6:45 PM. It will be the Sooners third game of the season and barring tragedy they should go into that game with a 2-0 record and ranked in the Top 10. An impressive performance on national television against the Pac 10 and the ESPN Hype Machine will be rolling in the Sooners' favor.

Recap of the Notre Dame Spring Game

You’ll notice we didn’t have a lot of (any) coverage of spring practices this year, including limited mention of Saturday’s Blue-Gold game. The main reason for this is that there was a lot of other stuff going on (March Madness, Frozen Four, weather getting nicer) and a ton of other sites covering the twenty minutes of practice that were open each day. If you’d like me to try and prognosticate on the upcoming season due to how well someone there said Duval Kamara was stretching, I can try, but it would be a waste of everyone’s time. As Pat at BGS said, there were just an obscene amount of outlets covering the goings-on that there was a very limited amount of what we could have added to the conversation.