It looks like Kyle Bonagura needs to update his blurb about Kyle Reed in his post from earlier today. I was just down at San Jose State’s season opener against UC Davis and boy, was Reed impressive. He took the ball in the second half with the Spartans trailing the Aggies 10-0 and on his first drive he led SJSU to its first TD of the game. Then, in what might be SJSU’s defining moment of the season (I’ll explain more later) he led a perfectly scripted drive in the final minute and a half and threw a 17-yard TD on fourth down with 8 seconds left to Kevin Jurovich to give the Spartans a 13-10 win.

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So I was sitting around watching College Gameday this morning and I got to thinking …. How many kids from the East Bay are playing D-I football and who should we keep an eye on this year. So I compiled a list of kids from the area playing D-I ball in the Pac-10, Mountain West and WAC along with who is where on their respective depth charts.

Enjoy.

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With the football preview on its way to your door step Sept. 4, you are just going to have to wait for the Hayward Area Athletic League preview. But I do want to give everyone a  list of possible HAAL story lines to watch for this season. This should be a fun year!

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I know, my colleagues know, and I bet most of you have a pretty good idea who the No. 1 team will be in our preseason football poll. It will be printed in our Sept. 4 special Prep Football Preview Section that will appear in all of our East Bay papers. However, just like we started during last year’s basketball season, our loyal Prep Corner readers will get a sneak preview. While the voting for our preseason poll is complete, nothing builds up excitement like a little anticipation so I’m going to make you wait around until Tuesday, Sept. 2. Then throughout the season, make sure to check out Prep Corner every Monday night when I will post the poll for you to get a sneak preview and leave your comments. Speaking of comments, let’s get them rolling? The No. 1 spot is pretty obvious, but who do you think will be No. 2, or 3 or 4 or 15? Speaking of which, we have dropped this year’s poll from 20 teams back down to 15. That’s what we do for other sports and that’s what we always did before the merger of ANG and the Contra Costa Times and it’s been decided we should return to that. Let’s start the discussion.

With all due respect to my buddy Mitch Stephens, I’ve got to say — what the heck is up with MaxPreps? I remember the first time I stumbled across the site back with I was a first-year free-lance reporter for the Daily Review. I had to cover a Hayward High football game up in Napa and started browsing around on the internet to see if I could find a Napa roster. I’ve used it ever since for tracking down rosters, sometimes schedules and occasionally even scores.

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I am sure high school football fans all around the Bay Area can hardly contain themselves with the season quickly approaching. I for one am not getting much sleep thanks to my eagerness to get out and cover a game. It has almost been a year!

While I have been counting down the days until the opening of the football season, I have also been gathering ideas for our blog on Friday nights. We obviously want to bring the quickest and most up-to-date coverage possible right here.

The following is a list of some things you can expect to see at Prep Corner Friday nights:

1. We will have a list of final scores from all the games in the East Bay (our live scoreboard can be found at www.insidebayarea.com/prepfootball).

 2. Interesting tidbits from games we were at and just our random rants or thoughts about any of the happenings from the day.

3. A video recapping the scores and key stats of the day and perhaps some player interviews from a couple games. This probably won’t be posted until midnight since we must do our stuff for the print edition before creating the video.  Midnight is our goal, but we have never done this before so give us a break the first couple of weeks if it doesn’t appear until 1 a.m. or so.

Those are the three major things that I can think of at the moment. I wanted to open it up to everyone out there for ideas, though. If there is something you would like to see on the blog Friday nights then let us know. We will do everything in our power to get you all the information you desire.

Comment below and let us know!

Alright everyone, we’ve all finished out league previews, so you’ll have to wait for the special section to come out to see all that information, but I thought I’d go ahead and throw out some notes and some of my impressions of the EBAL teams based on what I got from talking with the coaches in the league.

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I have a story that should make it into tomorrow’s papers (at least the Oakland Tribune), but just wanted to get the word out and get a little discussion going here about the future of the Oakland Athletic League. There was a lot of chatter, particularly back in June, that the OAL was looking into the possibility of joining the NCS. I’ve talked to a lot of people about the topic, both formally and informally off the record, and my opinion was always that this was a longshot to happen because quite frankly, almost nobody wanted it to.

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