Just a few quick hits:

– Did we think after the first weekend there would be concerns about the Duck offense? I don’t think so. I can’t get over how poorly Boise State played in the second half of that game Thursday night. Yet the Ducks’ offense couldn’t get much traction when the game was on the line. Strange.

– I was suprised at how well Portland State played in Corvallis. That wasn’t a bad performance at all, given the Vikings’ youth. I thought the Beavers would get to PSU’s quarterbacks but that didn’t happen. At the same time, after that opener, I have some serious doubts about the Oregon State pass defense.

– Wow, California. The Bears were really something against Maryland, which may or may not be a good team. Kevin Riley out of Beaverton? Sensational with 298 yards and four TD passes.

– Washington hung in with LSU for a while. . . could that mean the sleeping dawgs are rousing from their long sleep? I’m not ready to say that yet.

– Washington State drew about 22,000 for its home opener. That right there tells you what you need to know about that program.

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More than a few times I’ve wondered what 19-year-old college football players must think of Jerry Glanville. I mean, they aren’t old enough to actually remember him as an NFL coach. Or even an NFL commentator on television.

So here’s this little guy wandering around the practice field, struggling to remember his players’ names, speaking with (although he’s from Ohio) a southern drawl, dressed all in black — and yesterday wearing a black Army calvary hat with the crossed swords and everything.

Man, who is this guy?

We’re going to find out who he is this season. He admits that this is the first Portland State football team that he feels is all his. His players and the way he wants to play. Gone is one of the great offensive minds in football history, Mouse Davis — who no longer felt welcome when Glanville wanted to mess with the run-and-shoot offense. You have Mouse, you get the run and shoot — if you want him gone, you merely even suggest using a tight end or giving him a little help with the play calling.

That’s fine. Glanville’s the head coach. But I’d also suggest what the PSU coach is attempting to do — basically going without an offensive coordinator with one of the most intricate offensive schemes around — is close to really, really stupid. My guess will be that the longer the season goes, the more removed the players get from Mouse’s teachings, the worse things will get. When adjustments have to be made, I’m not sure who is going to be there to make them.

Look, I admit a bias. I’ve covered Mouse Davis since he coached at Sunset High School and we were trying to figure out what to call that goofy little offense he was running. That was back when everyone in football said that it was impossible for pass receivers not to run predetermined routes. They said there was no way high school kids would be smart enough to read defense, then make moves accordingly — and for the quarterback to make the same reads. They said you couldn’t play without a tight end and you needed to have two backs in the backfield.

Now just about everybody in football is using some form of what Mouse created.

This could be a triumphant season for Jerry Glanville. By now, he should have his defensive unit ready to play his aggressive style. It could all come together and it’s my alma mater, so I wish him the best. But honestly, I have no confidence in the whole thing.

Without Mouse at the helm of that offense, I have my doubts.

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Man, just about the only thing Portland State football had going for it was Mouse Davis. The man’s a legit offensive genius and from the first down of the season two years ago, he had the Vikings dashing up and down the field scoring points.

His offense is still, all these years later, about the coolest thing in football.

It certainly appears, though, that head coach Jerry Glanville has tried to mess around with the offense, with has always been a no-no with Davis. He’ll bring the circus to town, as long as he can be the ringmaster, but he doesn’t put up with a lot of interference.

UPDATE: Kerry Eggers has the story from Mouse… and yes, Glanville wanted to make some changes.

I’m sorry, because I like Jerry — but I’ve been a Mouse guy since he was coaching at Sunset and Hillsboro High School. I love the guy. And if he’s not running the offense at PSU, why, exactly, would I be going to the games?

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You jump up there and win a couple of conference championships and make two straight trips to the Big Dance, you’re going to get slapped down.

I hate this APR stuff. Nobody ever wants to stand up and say it, but holding athletic departments responsible for academic progress is a joke. Holding coaches responsible for it is even worse. I want the same kind of monitoring for the business and education departments. How many of their students are progressing toward graduation in a timely manner? Let’s fire a professor for that!

The idea that students are being exploited by athletic departments or that the NCAA must make sure ”student-athletes” get degrees is ridiculous. And I suspect it’s just one more thing used to keep the smaller schools from stepping up and challenging the big guys.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I sent a son off to college once with a baseball scholarship. Whether he got good grades or graduated or flunked out, it wasn’t the responsibility of his coach or athletic department. It was on him. He got the opportunity and what he did with it was up to him.

All these regulations do is lead to extensive use of tutors and aides to help the chosen few in the athletic departments — at the schools that can afford this — get through and be handed a meaningless piece of paper they didn’t earn in the first place.

That a few basketball players at Portland State didn’t chose to continue their education after basketball, or that they didn’t do well in school while playing, well … too bad. Nobody cares how many kids drop out of the library science department along the way. I long ago stopped thinking about college athletics as anything but a completely separate part of a university, barely connected at all to the academic side.

And I’m quite comfortable with that. Sports at the Division I level are a marketing program sponsored by a college designed to bring attention and funds to the schools and help alumni feel good about their college. Until they start recruiting football players out of physical education classes at the colleges rather than high schools thousands of miles away, that’s what I’ll continue to think.

There are a lot of rules about how these programs are run, but most of those rules are broken by the schools that can get away with it.

The athletes are in the middle but most of them are smart enough to prosper, getting either a quality education at a reduced price or a few bucks in a handshake from a booster. Or both. The ones who aren’t smart enough to do that probably shouldn’t have been in college in the first place. Oh well.

It is a fairly nasty business. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. That’s just the reality.

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First of all, let me say that I believe coaching college basketball is way more about recruiting good players than it is actually coaching them. There are too many John Caliparis and Tim Floyds out there for me to think otherwise.

It’s not quite the same at the Big Sky level, where nobody has truly great players, but still you need to recruit solid players just a little better than ones at the other schools at your level.

I believe Portland State has inherent basketball advantages in the Big Sky because it sits in a large urban area and the other schools do not. PSU should consistently get better players than the other schools. Not only is it a more attractive place to someone from outside the area, but there are more players capable of playing at that level in Portland than there are in, say, Bozeman or Missoula, Montana.

Ken Bone had great success at plucking transfers from major-college programs who returned to this area for one reason or another. He kind of recruited them as a second chance for those players.

So I guess, if I were Portland State, I’d be looking for someone who can recruit. But I’d also try to find someone who is good with the media because if you want that program to move forward, it’s going to take getting a lot of attention in this town — to an even greater extent than happens right now.

I mean, the big problem at PSU is that the team plays in an “arena” that seats a little more than a thousand people — and that the “arena” is too often quite large enough to accomodate the Vikings’ “crowds.” That has to change and in these times, it won’t be easy. Fund raising for a new arena is brutal unless somebody at Nike is writing big checks.

I’m not very familiar with the college coaching scene. I’m not the kind of guy who can point to any number of able assistant coaches around the Pac-10 who might do a good job. I don’t follow it that close.

What I’d say is that whomever the Vikings hire, he better be able to recruit and better be capable, through charm or charisma, of getting a whole lot of media attention. Which, eventually, leads to more money to grow the program.

And he better be willing to work cheap. Finding that guy will not be easy.

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There’s a rumor out there that the former Suns coach and Blazer guard is interested in the WSU job. I’m kind of surprised the Trail Blazers haven’t contacted him about coming on board as a temporary assistant coach, especially now that Maurice Lucas is out for the season.

And down the road, if Ken Bone were to get the WSU job, I’m wondering if Porter would be interested in the PSU gig.

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Hey, I’ll be the first one to admit, I was conned, too. I sat here all week thinking that Portland State had found a first-round matchup it could handle in the NCAA tournament. Xavier was a team the Viks could play, I said.

Well, it took about five minutes of watching the two teams on the floor together to realize that Portland State was seriously out of its element. The size, the quickness, the defensive skills — it was too much for PSU and it’s ridiculous to expect the Vikings to beat a team of that caliber.

Sure, the close-in three-point line in college basketball always gives an underdog a chance. If you have one of those crazy nights where the ball just goes in all the time, you can beat anybody. It’s a great equalizer. But realistically, even with that line, you can’t expect upsets of that magnitude to happen.

The very idea that these “mid-majors” can compete for very long in the tournament is a little bit silly. No, it’s a lot silly. They might steal a game every once in a while, maybe two. But the only reason these teams are in the tournament is to grab a little piece of the financial pie. Upsets? There are more of them in the regular season than there are in the tournament.

But the NCAA has been selling all this “madness” stuff for so long that people buy in. For every shocking upset there are 40 PSU-Xavier games. It’s all a big lie and I can’t believe I actually swallowed it again.

I’ve written this before and I still believe it: Schools from puny conferences like the Big Sky shouldn’t be in this tournament in the first place. Yeah — get all fired up about being in the “Big Dance.” But for me, why are you in a tournament that you can’t win?

I think the NCAA ought to go back to having Division II and III classifications that are realistic and usable. Why would you ever want your team entering a tournament it can’t possibly compete in? What’s the point? The glory days of Portland State football haven’t come since they’ve moved up to the Big Sky and the I-AA (or whatever they’re calling it these days) level. The glory days came at a lower level, when nearly 20,000 people were jamming the stadium for Division II playoffs. Winning, no matter the level, is what’s fun for players and fans.

I have no problem with schools having big dreams. But let’s all come back down to earth. And if I ever again pick any Big Sky team to win a tournament game, please feel free to spam me all day.

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Tonight, Portland State and long-time NFL coach Jerry Glanville is schedule to appear on Talkin’ Ball, which, depending on what time the Blazer-Bobcat game ends, should air about 10 o’clock.
I’m looking forward to hearing his take on the Cardinals and Steelers. That’s Talkin’ Ball at 10 tonight on Comcast Sportsnet — starring, of course, Jim Pasero.

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There is little doubt, in most people’s minds. My pal, The Bean, has the RPI to back it up.

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I’m not sure how much longer 76-year-old Mouse Davis is going to continue coaching the offense at PSU, but if you’re a football fan, you owe it to yourself to watch his teams go about their business.

I watched the Vikings Saturday afternoon beat Eastern Washington 47-36 at PGE Park and saw PSU quarterback Drew Hubel throw for 623 yards and five touchdowns. And the thing was, between missed open receivers and dropped passes, there had to be at least another 150 yards out there the Viks didn’t get.

“If he had made all the throws he was capable of making, he would have had a huge game,” said Davis, the man who virtually invented the run-and-shoot offense.

As crazy as it sounds in a game where Hubel set a school record for passing yardage, Davis was right. Hubel completed 44 passes but still threw 29 incompletions. That’s right, he threw the ball 73 times. The offense is a thing of beauty — there were Portland State receivers running free in the secondary all afternoon.

The Viks’ execution is not always as good as it should be, but just watching the way Davis manipulates the game to develop open receivers, is worth the price of admission.

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