Beaver Links 7/10/2013

52 days until kickoff vs. Eastern Washington.

Although "The Dam Links" looks to be running away with the Column Title poll, I promised to leave it open until Sunday night, so the first column of next week will be the first one with the new title. It's been a busy week for OSU athletics (at least as far as July weeks go), so this one is arriving a day earlier than expected.

OSU has redesigned their official website to "focus on providing fans with a more streamlined experience on a singular platform that delivers a variety of new features for a more user-friendly and interactive experience." It is also designed to integrate more seamlessly into other Pac-12 websites. While I am not used to it yet, my initial impression is a positive one, and anything that improves the mobile functionality is good with me. Trying to navigate the old site on a smart phone was difficult at best, and at times was flat out impossible. In a typical browser, it often did seemed to value form over function, which is not ideal, in my opinion. Amongst other improvements, they are making statistics easier to find, which is good for number crunching nerds like me. I will save final judgment until I try to buy tickets online, which I probably won't bother to do until baseball season comes around again.

John Canzano's always perfect, never-questioned or second guessed list of Oregon's 25 Most Influential People in Oregon Sports got started Monday with #25-21. A Beaver face shows up at #23. Kind of a sad day when the Ducks' baseball coach is more prominent than the Beaver basketball coach. Not necessarily wrong, just sad. I'd put Robinson ahead of Horton still, just because of his political connections and Eugene's general blase attitude towards baseball, but I suppose you could say the same thing about Corvallis' blase attitude towards basketball. Of course, a large part of why Corvallis doesn't care about OSU basketball because it's been a Pac-12 cellar dweller for years; you can't really say the same thing about U of O baseball. Maybe it's just still too new to be a huge draw?

I think pre-season Watch Lists are silly, pointless, and a product of the Low News Cycle of mid-summer. That being said, BtD is certainly not immune to said Low News Cycle, so we'll take note of the Watch Lists. Brandin Cooks is on the watch list for the Maxwell Award (best overall player) and Scott Crichton made the Bednarik Watch List (best defensive player). Good for them. SB Nation has complete copies of both the Maxwell Watch List and the Bednarik Watch List. They're nice, but not particularly exclusive -- I counted 76 players on the Maxwell list. Every Pac-12 school except Utah, Wazzu and Cal got someone on one of the lists (yes, even Colorado). Isaac Seumalo is also on the Rimington Award Watch List for the nation's best center.

Andrew Moore gets yet another freshman All-America honor, making him a unanimous Freshman All-American.

SB Nation's College Football writers predict every conference race. Unsurprisingly, Oregon State and Washington are very close for 3rd and 4th in the Pac-12 north. I have yet to see a legitimate Pac-12 North prediction that has anything other than Stanford/Oregon as 1st/2nd in some order, OSU/Washington as 3rd/4th in some order, and Cal/WSU as 5th/6th in some order.

Pre-game.com lists a bunch of casino odds for Oregon State for the upcoming year. Notable amongst these are national championship at 125:1, Pac-12 title at 12:1, and Pac-12 North title at 5:1. That 125:1 odds are the 14th best in the country. So you're telling me there's a chance?

On the same web site, the Golden Nugget in Vegas lists the projected spread for the last 10 Beaver games of the year, and they project Oregon State as favorites in seven of those. Add in the first two games, where OSU is sure to be a favorite, and Vegas figures OSU to go 9-3 if odds hold. Two of the three games they are underdogs in, they are slim underdogs. (3 pts vs. Stanford and 4.5 pts at ASU).

ESPN's Pac-12 blog is doing an "Ultimate Road Trip" segment lining out which game in the Pac-12 they would most like to attend, with at least some effort towards seeing most teams at least once. In week 10, they finally getting around to seeing the Beavers in person, against USC.

If you find anything else, leave it in the comments. Until then, go Beavs!