Dots: Signing Day Eve

A quick rundown on how things are going to go tomorrow with the start of the Early Signing Period. I know there have been people with strong opinions on this topic in the past and I hope we’ve addressed those concerns.

We will be putting out a separate article for each recruit when the letter of intent is officially signed. Those are intended for people who do not follow recruiting regularly and have all of the basic info, the story of their recruitment, where they fit into the roster, and their highlight video if available. All of those articles will be linked to a hub so you can navigate to them from one place on the front page. We will also have an open thread going that will be the major place for discussion throughout the day. If you already know everything about each of the recruits and just want a place to talk about them then that will be the place for you.

Football Dots

• Mike Vorel of the Seattle Times lays out his superlatives for the members of Washington’s 2020 recruiting class.
• Dawgman put together the results from polling media members who were the top-5 members of UW’s recruiting class. There was a surprising amount of variation.
• Christian Caple of The Athletic is already looking ahead to 2021 and the potential crown jewel of the state of Washington’s loaded recruiting class with DT J.T Tuimoloau.
• Washington TE Hunter Bryant was named a 2nd Team All-American by the Associated Press.
• An interesting look from Banner Society at what an average current recruit realistically remembers about various programs.
• ESPN graded the coaching hires so far this offseason and the Huskies get an A- for promoting Jimmy Lake.
• Speaking of Jimmy Lake...Happy birthday Coach Lake! I’m guessing he won’t have time to fully celebrate it until next week. I’ve heard there’s stuff going on in the next few days that will command his attention.

Basketball Dots

• Notes from Coach Hopkins’ press conference yesterday where he stressed that Washington has to cut down on turnovers if they want to win games against premium opponents.
• Percy Allen at the Seattle Times has a game preview for tonight’s contest against Seattle U led by former Garfield star Terrell Brown.
• Somehow the Huskies moved up 5 spots to re-enter the AP Top-25 despite not playing a game last week. They’ll take it.
• Washington was ranked 35th in the initial release of the NET rankings which will be used on the individual team sheets for the NCAA selection committee. 7 Pac-12 teams start out in the top-40 which is good news for the conference’s NCAA tournament chances.
• Some highlights of Jaden McDaniels through his first 9 college games:

• James Harden had an ill-fated attempt at starting s*** with Dejounte Murray

• Speaking of Dejounte Murray...

SBNation Dot

It was announced yesterday that there will be major changes with regards to SBNation staff located in California. Due to recently passed California legislation, writers that had previously been viewed as independent contractors must now become employees receiving benefits or else have extremely low annual article limits (less than one article per week). You may not be shocked to learn that the significant cost providing benefits to hundreds of staff would add to Vox’s bottom line has instead led them to essentially let go all paid staff in the state of California and hire back a limited number as full or part-time employees to fulfill all the coverage responsibilities.

For blogs covering teams outside the state of California such as UWDP this only impacts any writers they have that are California residents. Unfortunately we do have one staff writer affected by this change and I’m going to let them discuss it once they’ve had time to figure out what they want to do moving forward. This will also mean a complete restructuring at the team sites for Cal/Stanford/UCLA/USC who we interact with on a regular basis. For all of the contributors at those sites who will no longer be associated with SBNation and we wish them the best of luck in finding a new platform for their tremendous work.