(Written by kencraw)

Let’s be honest, what does anyone really know about UC Davis? I mean, I live in the Sacramento area and nobody around here cares about their sports programs. If anything, Sac State is the more talked about program, even though at this point UC Davis is the superior program (Sac State is a lot more entrenched as a sports program in the region).

If you go to the Sac Bee sports page and drill down to the college section, there’s not a single article about UC Davis despite their being an article about both Cal and Stanford. You’ve got to go to the archive before you find anything.

Reading through the few articles I could find from fall camp, here’s what we know:

• They’re breaking in a Redshirt Freshman as their starting QB name Randy Wright
• He’s replacing a two-year starter that was supposed to be their senior star who left UC Davis to be a minister this summer.
• Wright is “a threat with his legs.”
• They use a running back by committee approach with 6 RB’s listed as likely playing on Saturday.
• They lost their star receiver to graduation who walked on to the 49ers before being cut last week.
• They were 6-5 last year and won the “Great West” conference. The two preceding years they were 5-7 and 5-6.
• They got a couple votes in the main FCS poll coming in at an unofficial 37.
• Their practices and scrimmages are open to the public. (Apparently they don’t subscribe to the Jeff Tedford school of media relations.)
• Their coach is part time, teaching tennis and racquetball classes for the University.
• They held a scrimmage at 7 PM on August 27th and admission was free.

That’s really just about everything said in the 2 articles and handful of blurbs. No recap of the scrimmage, no position by position notes, I’m sure I could have dug up a depth chart somewhere and it’s 80% likely the link won’t be dead. But that’s about it.

That said, does it really matter? I didn’t know anything about Portland State or Eastern Washington either, two teams that I suspect far more info is available for, and it didn’t stop me from pontificating.

This game is really all about the Bears and seeing how crisp and sharp they look on both sides of the ball. So what are we looking for? Here’s my list of what I’ll be looking for:

• How do the WRs look, particularly Keenan Allen. Are they running sharp routes? Are they finding the holes in the zone? Do they look in sync with Riley? Are they taking plays off?
• How is Edwards doing at tackle? Has his consistency improved? One could generalize this to the whole line. The key is *consistency* not whether they blow people off the line most downs. They should do that just based on their size advantage. The question is whether play after play, they’re executing.
• How much playing time is MSG getting? How healthy does he look?
• How is Eric Stevens progressing?
• How does this new aggressive defensive scheme look? Does it look overly risky? Do the players seem to be playing with their hair on fire or do they look hesitant? How much zone in the secondary? How much 4-3 versus how much 3-4?
• How is Marc Anthony developing at cornerback?
• How deep are Tavecchio’s kickoffs getting?

Of course I’ll be observing things overall to see how the team is developing, but those are the key areas I’ll be looking for.