we would win in the past. Ranked team coming into Tampa early in the season, USF being undefeated. I honestly felt this would be our return to national notoriety. I think we have been spoiled as a fan base, with so many upsets of ranked teams in the past. We would relish the spotlight and play the part of scrappy underdog to perfection, more often then not pulling an upset. As with a lot of fans, not upset we lost, just the WAY we did. We did not look ready to compete with the big boys and almost played right into their hands.
It was great to see RJS packed again, even if it wasn't partisan. I do worry about how yesterday's result impacts future attendance this season. We are in the unfortunate situation of having to not only battle our gameday opponent, but having to lobby the fans to come out to see it every week. Maybe I'm wrong and we draw 40+ the rest of the way (would be ecstatic with that), however the Tampa fanbase is fairweather and I can just see the excuses flying in.
Gotta get a few other points off my chest:
- why were we rushing 4 lineman with no help for the majority of the game? Surely with what Cook did to us last year, we sell out to stop him and make the redshirt frosh beat us. By the time we adjusted, late 4th, the game was well out of reach. Hated seeing a future NFL star get so much SPACE.
- If Cook is a USF killer, D'Ernest Johnson must give FSU nightmares. Is that 5 TDs in 2 games against them? As much as Cook has against us. Love the way he plays, really lucky to have him.
- Offensively, we seemed to run out of ideas early on. Even the commentators said it, we looked vanilla. I think we should have pressed them more with the option, getting the ball on QFs hands more often. The offense also has a nasty habit of going 3 and out consecutively on multipe drives, happened early in the Syracuse game as well.
- Was not going to post this but have to be honest: I didn't like QFs body language after our drives started stalling. I'm a huge fan of his because of his competitiveness, however didn't see that out of him early on so much. After that screen pass he one hopped to Adams during the start of the 4th drive, he seemed to lose that juice.