Note: If you didn't get a chance to read CV3000's "Twas the Night before Kickoff", you need to do that now.

#91 Pannel Egboh - Defensive End (6-6/270) (Senior)

Egboh has the potential to be one of the Pac-10's quickest and most dominant pass rushers, and he has NFL size. He's made 24 consecutive starts for the Cardinal since recovering from a broken leg suffered the second to last play of a game his freshman year. He enters the season with 109 career tackles, 49 of those coming last season. He's scheduled to go up against the right side of our offensive line (Remmers and Peat), which could spell disaster.

#54 Ekom Udofia - Nose Tackle (6-2, 305) (Senior)

Udofia won't start at nose tackle (Sione Fua will), but look for Ekom to do damage off the bench. He's started at nose tackle the last two seasons (while Fua was on a LDS mission), but missed he last five games of last season with an ankle injury. He also missed all of Spring practice. However, the time without the pads gave him time to work on his conditioning-- he lost 30 pounds and 3% body fat over the summer. He now says that he's "in the best shape of my life" and that the extra conditioning has been "paying dividends".

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Were just over eight hours away from kickoff of the 2008 season, folks. We'll have a Game Thread up on Building the Dam an hour and a half before kickoff, but if you're getting antsy, (who isn't!!!!) you can chat in this thread up until the game.

GO BEAVERS!!!

We are excited to announce a new feature here at Building the Dam: we will be running a college football blog pick 'em contest.

Let's find out who is really the best Pac-10 pigskin prognosticator! 

League Details:

Sign Up: Join our game here. It's completely free to play.

Make your picks: The pool is open for business now and is ready for ALL of you to join. The first picks are due by August 30th - so sign up now. (Note: Since Oregon State plays today (yes folks, that's today) this week, they will not be included in this week's games)

Come back each week...: Each week we'll have about 6-8 games for you to pick - we'll be picking the winners only - no spreads - but you'll also have to assign confidence points to your picks.  If you're right, you'll get the amount of confidence points you assigned to a game.

...for the whole season: The pool will run the whole regular season, concluding on December 6th with, among other games, the conference championship games. Let's get as many of you signed up as we can, and find out who really is the best armchair quarterback.

If you've already signed up, click here to go to the main page and log in.

But if not, click here to join in on the party!

Picks are due by this Saturday!

Dear Pac 10 Fans:

Times are tough in the College Football landscape. There are several conferences out there who want a piece of Pac-10 superiority and they will stoop to any level to take what is ours. Media contracts, massive letter-writing campaigns, good ol' fashion bitching and moaning are just the beginning. We must fight back. But, really that's a lot of trouble. So, why don't we just have a pick 'em contest instead? It's e asy, it's simple. Just log in and make picks every week and maybe you'll win, maybe you won't. That's how you play.

Join our game here. 

--CV3000 and Jake, Building the Dam

While some of the features of Building the Dam 2.0 might be considered 'take it or leave it,' depending on your preferences, one of the new site functionalities we'd really love to see everyone take advantage of is Event Tagging.

When composing a Fan Post or Fan Shot for BtD, authors will always have the option to tag the story using the various mechanisms on the right side of the posting page (shaded in blue). Note that one such mechanism is labeled "Events"; with it, an author can tag his story to a specific game/event in the site database. The beauty of the system is that all content tagged to any given event will appear on that game's event page.

For example, I've now tagged several stories to the Oregon State- Stanford game. By clicking on the "COMPLETE COVERAGE" button at the bottom of the "Next Game" box in the left sidebar of BtD's main page, a reader will be taken to the contest's event page.

Of all the tagging tools available on this site (there are many, they all are wonderful), this is by far the most useful. This site is driven in no small part by community-generated content; if all of you start event tagging when posting an item relating to a specific game, we'll all be the better for it by being able to browse pre-sorted game-relevant content in one tidy page.

And now, in case you struggle with basic drop down menus, some pictures. Hooray.

It will show Oregon State's schedule, of course. 

The only possible confusion might arise from that top right menu, which you'll need to change to 'Upcoming' for a game not yet played. If, however, you're writing on a Monday about the past Saturday's game, you'll leave the menu in the 'Completed' slot and choose the appropriate game before clicking 'add'.

It's that simple. Thanks in advance.

Stolen with permission from Burnt Orange Nation.

To give you a taste of what gameday will feel like in Palo Alto, here's some brief information on Stanford Stadium. If you'll be attending the game, we'd love to hear your first hand account. Post it in the FanPost section if you feel so inclined, or send an e-mail to jake.buildingthedam@gmail.com so we can chat.

Stanford Stadium received a complete facelift after the 2005 season, in which the old stadium was torn to the ground and a new $100 million facility was erected on top of it-- all in the span of 42 months.

via www.cantoni.org

New Stanford Stadium is now considered one of the premier college football stadiums in the country, although it ranks 58th nationally in seating capacity at 50,033. In the second year of the new stadium's operation, the Cardinal averaged crowds of 39,332, the second lowest total in the Pac-10 (only Washington State had a lower average). Also, new Staford Stadium has never expereinced a sellout.

After riding the Alexis Serna wave the past four years, Oregon State will have to break in a new kicker this year. That's probably the biggest news item regarding the Special Teams unit, along with the fact that Oregon State is looking to find a punter who can do more than an average of 35.4 yards per punt. By position:

• Kicker: Oregon State has been grooming Justin Kahut to kick the past few years, as he watched and learned behind 2005 Groza winner and All-American Alexis Serna in 2006 and 2007. Kahut was our guest on Building the Dam two weeks ago, and discussed such things as his summer, what learning from Alexis was like, and how he became a kicker. Justin has been bothered by a groin injury sporadically throughout fall camp. He says the injury is more like a nagging pain that comes and goes, but is occurring because he wasn't in shape coming into camp. "During the summer we'd kick three days in a row, instead of seven like we've done in camp. I overdid it at the start. I should have upped it at the end of the summer". As far as we know, Kahut is recovered and ready to kick against Stanford.  Matt Barker will be the backup, and could be used as some sort of kickoff specialist at some point.
• Punter: Johnny Hekker has won the job over Sean Sehnem and Ryan Allen. Hekker was a quarterback in high school, and Riley likes him because of his consistency and all around athleticism. Sehnem will be the backup, and Allen plans to redshirt. Is Hekker the next Paulescu? Who knows. We'll see how this experiment goes.
• Punt Returner: Sammie will be the starter, hoping to return to 2006 form. Taylor Kavanaugh, who averaged 6.9 per return last year, will be the backup.
• Holder: Ocho Quatro, baby.
• Snapper: True freshman Marcus Perry emerged from fall camp as #1 on the depth chart, and that's all we need to know until the first bad snap. 
  
• Kick Returner: Lots of talent here. James Rodgers is the only person who has been solidified throughout camp. It looks like junior Patrick Henderson (1 return for 11 yards last year) will join him, but we could also see a Rodgers-Rodgers duo at times. The beat writers found out this week that James went by "Quan" in high school, so having both Quizz and Quan on the field at the same time will forever be called playing "Q-ball". Even though the thought of Quizz and Quan returning kicks excites us, remember that they both will be integral parts of the offense. We especially don't want to empty Jacqiuzz's tank his freshman year.
• Other Special Teams notes: Reserve cornerback and special teams player James Dockery hurt his knee last week lifting weights, and will have his knee scoped immediately. He'll be out for a few weeks. His absence may open the door for someone like Casey Kjos or Damola Adeniji. 

We took a somewhat elaborate look at the Stanford Cardinal a little less than a month ago, but now it's time to refresh our memory on the Cardinal and reacquaint ourselves with the team that finished 4-8 last year, but has their sights set much higher this year. We'll start with the defense.

[Update: BONUS MATERIAL! A Stanford defense pronunciation guide has been added at the end of this post. However, We still reccomend that you struggle through reading the entire post without sneaking a peak at the guide. It's better that way.]

The Defense has eight returning starters, which, as DE Erik Lorig says, has allowed them to "focus more on their individual technique and responsibility". That's kinda scary, when you realize that although the Cardinal return eight starters and even more guys with starting experience (injuries seemed to be a problem last year), their biggest loss was the man in charge: former defensive coordinator Scott Shafer. He left for Michigan, which sounds like a promotion, but with his last accomplishment at Stanford being coaching the Pac-10's #9 run defense, we don't understand why new UM coach Rich Rodriguez made the call. If the players are saying that they can focus more on individual technique after loosing a coordinator, that must mean that new co-coordinators Ron Lynn and Andy Buh are doing something right. 

The fact that Stanford has new coordinators on defense compounded with the fact that this is Stanford's season opener is likely what keeps Mike Riley up late at night the most. Oregon State really has no idea what Stanford is going to do on defense, and it's not like Riley or Langsdorf can just pop a VHS tape into the VCR (err.. I mean, hit a few buttons on a keyboard) and see what packages and formations Stanford utilized last week. 

Likely, it will be a combination of some 3-4, 4-3, 46-Bear, Tampa-2, Cloud-3 Dog, Raider, Nickel, Buffalo Nickel, Buffalo wing, Dime, Quarter, Penny, Wheat Penny, Fifty Cent Piece, Peso, Pound, Sacagawea and Liberty Dollar packages. And that's the problem, right there.  [Coach Riley has said that he thinks the new coordinator is bringing some type of Tampa-2 defense, but we won't know until Moevao sticks his hands under Linnenkohl's (lawyers). -ed.]

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In order to prepare us for the upcoming season, we bring in Barry Bolton and John C. Witter, who would like us to tell you that they are the Senior and Managing Editors of the site COUGFAN.com. They're here to enlighten us on the Pac-10 representative from Pullman, who the Beavers will host on November 11th.

There are many pre-season predictions about your team. Why are they all so horribly wrong? Give us specifics.

COUGFAN.COM: The Paris Hilton ad, high gas prices, the whole Brett Farve thing, they're all contributing factors and not necessarily in that order. Oh, and all the pundits are no-talent ass-clowns. It's long been evident many of the "old media" guard are lazy schleps who know more about the business end of an aerosol cheese can than they do about college football. (On a completely different matter, we'd still like to buy advertising space on Ted Miller's forehead, though.)

Ask and you shall receive, fellas. 

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