The Pacific-10 Conference has released its annual football prospectus looking ahead to the 2008 season with schedule, bowl and team-by-team information.
Pretty useful stuff to get us through this early part of the off-season.
Just a final reminder that the UW coaches tour — a golf and banquet event featuring Tyrone Willingham, Lorenzo Romar and Tia Jackson — will open at Fircrest Golf Club on Thursday.
Here’s a link to the details.
First and second round games of next season’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament will be held in Portland and in Boise — where UW started its Sweet 16 run a few seasons ago.
Here’s the link for ticket information.
Washington’s crowd for the spring game on Saturday was estimated at about 9,000, a nice enough crowd for a clear spring day.
However, it was just a drop in the bucket compared to some of the other spring game crowds around the country (most in the South, not surprisingly).
Here’s this spring’s Top 10 attendance figures for spring football games played through last weekend: Nebraska – 80,149
Alabama – 78,200
Ohio State – 76,346
Penn State – 73,000
Florida – 61,000
Texas – 43,000
Auburn – 35,000
LSU – 33,624
The free agent signings have continued, with UW’s Louis Rankin (and Western Washington linebacker Shane Simmons) signing with the Oakland Raiders.
I’ve also heard Marcel Reece is signing with the Dolphins, Greyson Gunheim with the Rainders, Jordan Reffett and Roy Lewis to the Steelers and Chad Macklin to the Vikings.
Here’s the current list from UW.
Over its two-day draft, the NFL selected players from Army and Bentley and finally even Idaho. NFL teams also drafted a player named “Washington,” but ultimately they drafted no one from Washington.
At least not the University of Washington. One player who played his collegiate career in the state of Washington was taken: WSU quarterback Alex Brink by the Houston Texans in the seventh round.
And shortly after the draft UW receiver Anthony Russo of Lakewood and WSU’s Michael Bumpus were about to sign with the Seahawks.
Before the draft, Russo had worked out for
…As we anticipated in our Saturday story, no Huskies were taken on the first day of the NFL draft.
It’s also not a sure thing that any will go today, either, but there should be at least some suspense for players such as Anthony Russo of Lakewood, Marcel Reece, Louis Rankin and maybe some others.
Rankin told his hometown paper that’s he’s confident that he’ll get a shot. And even if undrafted, a handful of Washington players are likely to get their chances as free agents.
Coaches and players seemed to agree that the UW spring game was a fair representation of what had been happening behind the scenes through the previous 14 days of spring.
It’s always hard to tell whether a low-scoring spring game indicates a strong defense or a weak offense. In reality, it might not indicate much of anything. Both teams really played vanilla because, as offensive coordinator Tim Lappano pointed out, there were green shirts — Oregon green — in the stands. Also, the running clock made for fewer offensive plays than a typical game.
Here is my
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