The Great 8

Hoggins is a baller.

Please let this be true by tomorrow morning.

Q isn't playing in an offense conducive to his skillset. Neither is DJ.

There's a clear talent gap. Eventually it should overcome our generally idiotic decision-making.

FIRE THIS IDIOT

This is a ******* joke and completely falls on coaching.

What is he talking about?

Are we going to have sufficient time to practice for this game? I'd hate to blow this one because we can't practice while they can.

We're top 50 in research expenditures, top 10 in patents, and on even footing with UF and FSU as far as the state is concerned (preeminent). Yet, US News has us in a separate league essentially? GTFO of here with that trash, guys.

Nice jump. It's still a pile of garbage. I mean, they have Mercer above us????????

RIP, Joel. For those who saw my other post, I was trying to mock McMurphy by bringing up another irrelevant part of Joel's life. Obviously, that didn't come through. Sorry. Brett is being a huge turd by even mentioning Leavitt, though.

Agreed. Is there someone we can contact as a reminder?

I really don't get how these games aren't being rescheduled. Almost at all costs, including rearrangement of schedules, alternative venues, or odd-day games. This is huge business.

Whether there's a "trajectory" after one (two) games is not the entire point. The point about close games being easier to lose due to fluke plays, idiotic coaching decisons, and the like was kind of highlighted by that one Skip year. If balls bounced differently we could've won a lot of those pre-BJ injury games. Everything equal, you'd rather win blowouts than close games. Not a difficult concept to grasp. I'd rather have blown out SBU and felt more comfortable.

nm

How many metrics is UCiF hitting?

I can't speak to how Clemson played in that game, but of course anyone is susceptible to "playing down" to opponents. And, maybe we've kept a lot close to the vest. My concern arises from the way we had SBU stay close for so long. An FCS should simply be manhandled by our OL. If we only stayed close because we were fumbling the ball and dropping passes, I'd be less concerned, honestly. Those are "easy" to cleanup. Complex blocking schemes that the OL isn't setup for success in (e.g. running off-tackle), that's a bigger problem that's hard to overcome without scheme changes. And, that's risky when you've spent a whole off-season presumably practicing what we've seen for 2 games. As I said elsewhere, I'm praying we've been playing down or have been sharking opponents and not running our real offense. I think we'll have a good idea of what's going to happen the rest of this season after Saturday's game.

This is YUGE, folks. Very proud today :).

Why not get their plane back AFTER that happens? Seems even safer...

2/22? That's honestly the worst line I ever remember seeing.

Your callout of we "don't know yet if SJSU is a bad team this year or not" makes it sound like you're basing our performance against them relative to how good they are. That's not an unfair thing to do, it also removes all ability to judge the games until the end of the season. My overarching point is *it doesn't matter* how good they become, specifically for SBU, because a top-tier team in their position should be getting annihilated by a #19 team in a "P6" conference. I don't think anyone, including players and coaches, would refute that we didn't beat these teams as convincingly as we'd expected. Hoping it's because those teams have both captured lightning in a bottle and will suddenly be great, is grasping at straws, imho. It's much more likely that we're going to a.) underperform our own expectations this year, or b.) these games were an anomaly. Not that c.) these teams are better than we expected and close to what we'll see in conference play.

Sorry, we should still mop the floor with an 11-1 FCS team, which is their best case scenario. You're really grasping at straws if you're betting on SJSU and SBU to have breakout seasons to redeem our crappy play. It's much more prudent simply to say, it's fine, we can do a 180 in conference play. Hell, during 2007 we struggled to beat Elon then went on to beat Auburn, WVU, and UCiF by 50. I'd much rather hope that happens, than SJSU/SBU being top of their conferences.

Defense is pretty dramatically improved, based on the data we have so far. Offense is pretty dramatically worse, based on the data we have so far. We've shown we can win games by having a superior offense. Naturally, it's concerning to see it regress.

Yeah, silver lining is we'll still have proven depth at the X spot.

That's really all well and good. It doesn't mean you shove the current talent that's a square peg into the round hole of the offense they'd like to run someday. Gradually morph the talent into what you believe will do the best long term, don't expect great results from talent who's been recruited for something else. This really isn't rocket science.