College Football Nation: Texas A&M wants to be Oregon and Air Force Upgrades

Jeff Hostetler FishWrap, FishWrap Archive

With media days wrapped up for all the major conferences, we can now focus on kickoff being less than a month away. We can actually start talking about the game of football. In fact, the Week 1 match-ups are so close we can begin to deal with game plan ideas and predictions. Oh, finally!

Everyone remember those cool upgrades to Oregon’s football facilities? Well, Texas A&M wants you to forget about that and focus on the cool new upgrades they have done this off season. It looks really good. I am sure we would see fewer schools upgrading like this if the players were to be paid. Also, let’s not forget that everything is bigger in Texas. Texas A&M’s stadium upgrades should be done for this season.

While some schools are working to upgrade their football facilities and stadiums, others are looking to show some flash on the field. Air Force just might have outdone everyone with their new helmet designs. I think every school should always be open to changing their uniforms. Heaven forbid if Penn State or Alabama were to even think of changing their uniforms.

Then we have the Coaches Poll that came out this week. Did you all like what you saw? Stewart Mandel gave his two cents on who is ranked too high and too low in the polls already. Once you give Mandel’s ratings a look over you might have to agree. In my opinion, the polls should not be released until Week 7. That would give us a good idea of who the real contenders are at that time and not have teams over-ranked as they frequently are in the pre-season ratings.

Among the top contenders, Auburn will be without their starting QB for Week 1 vs. Arkansas. Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said QB Nick Marshall will not be the starter Week 1 as part of his punishment for his off season run-ins with the law. Malzahn did not say that he would “not” play in Week 1…just not starting. I imagine if Auburn somehow finds itself down 21-7 in the first half…out will run Nick Marshall to get things going.

Let’s keep things going with Auburn for one more topic. Auburn just announced they will be doing a home and home series with Clemson starting in 2016. Thanks to the playoffs we will be seeing these bigger games happening. If you look closely at the article, it looks like there are going to be some big time match-ups in Week 1 of 2016. We can thank the new playoffs for soon giving us Alabama vs. USC, LSU vs Wisconsin, UCLA vs Texas A&M, Notre Dame vs Texas and Arizona vs BYU. Look for this type of scheduling to be part of the norm as college football and the playoffs evolve. Matchups like this are going to be awesome:

Kickoff is just a little under a month away. We will have some great games to look forward to. We need to tolerate just a few more weeks of listening to NCAA trial news or which team is doing a new upgrade. I hope we can begin to get some bulletin board material for the Week 1 match-ups, we will see. It is going to be an exciting season not only for Ducks fans, but for every college football fan.

New 2024 FishDuck Publishing Schedule….

During the off-season the FishDuck.com publishing schedule will consist of articles on Mondays and Tuesdays. Do keep checking as new articles could be published during the week when a writer has something to say.

In mid-August of 2024, we will go back to the seven-days-a-week of articles during the football season as we did in the football season of 2023.

The Our Beloved Ducks Forum (OBD) is where we we discuss the article above and many more topics, as it is so much easier in a message board format over there.  At the free OBD forum we will be posting Oregon Sports article links, the daily Press Releases from the Athletic Department and the news coming out every day.

Our 33 rules at the free OBD Forum can be summarized to this: 1) be polite and respectful, 2) do not tell anyone what to think, feel or write, and 3) no reference of any kind to politics. Easy-peasy!

OBD Forum members….we got your back.  No Trolls Allowed!