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Happy Monday, all.
Taking a quick break from working on a story about how Oregon’s patching together its offensive line for a few housekeeping items.
1. After enjoying it a whole lot more than I anticipated, I’m planning on covering a second season of Portland Timbers soccer. There are a lot of stories to tell from that team and I’m fascinated to see how this roster adjusts here in the second year of Phil Neville’s tenure. With the World Cup happening on American soil a year from now, this is a growing and under-reported on market I want to be in.
2. I realize the Venn diagram between MLS and college football fans doesn’t have much overlap. If you don’t want to be bombarded with emails from one or the other, you can opt in or out of coverage from each sport in the Substack settings under “Manage Subscription.”
3. I will still be writing stories about things other than the Ducks and Timbers. I have a bit more time for that now that the football season is over. But don’t worry Ducks fans — I know what most of you are here for.
4. What do you want to read? Is there a player profile I haven’t gotten to? Is there a game you want me to revisit? Is there someone who deserves some recognition but hasn’t gotten it? Let me know either in the comments or via email. This is the time of the year I can sink my teeth into things, and I think it would be fun to try to do an occasional “Subscriber Request” story.
5. A sincere thank you to everyone who has stuck around or subscribed here during the football offseason. The budget gets pretty tight when the Ducks aren’t on the field and your support means everything to me and the future of this website.
As a reminder, please share the stories you like! And if you’re already a subscriber and want to help out a little more, you can always gift or donate a subscription to someone who can’t afford one.
6. To close, we have two to three days left of this sunshine spell here in Oregon. Here’s how we got after it up at Laurance Lake last week. Enjoy it while we have it.
Have a great week.
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor
Thank you everyone for your comments and submissions. I have a lot to work with here.
I’d be interested in a story on the coaching skills vs recruiting skills of OCs and DCs. Oregon seems to have gone all in on the recruiting side but lacking on the coaching side, especially in the defensive side. I look at Ohio State with two senior citizenish coordinators (well 1 now) that seem much more about coaching while the program recruits for itself. Would that ever work at Oregon or do they just have to be all recruiting given their outpost location? I feel like an established D coordinator at Oregon would make a world of difference. Let everyone else recruit but get one amazing X and O coach. Pay them $3MM just like PsU did. We all know there are mercenaries out there that will go anywhere for the right price, both players and coaches. Not my most cohesive post, but I think you get the gist.