Duarte's 2018 Record Prediction

He has the Cougars going 10-2 with loses to Texas Tech and Memphis.

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He’s right on all but TT and Memphis.

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Which means Memphis would need two more conference losses somewhere else v

Do you mean, if we lose to Memphis, we need Memphis to lose two other games for us to win the division? That’s not entirely true because we could still win a three way tiebreaker.

That said, if we go 10-2 and don’t make the conference championship, I’m OK with that. We probably finish ranked and have a chance for next year to make a big run.

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Remember in these tie-breaker scenarios Memphis has to play UCF this year. We don’t. Most are predicting UCF to win the east this year, take that how you may.

If we go 10-2 and don’t win the west that means the AAC has had a very good year once again. I would also like our chances of getting a P5 bowl slot in a bigger bowl than our conference tie-ins.

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I think Temple and Houston are in the championship game. As good as Milton McKenzie is, I don’t think Heupel was that great of a coordinator, and I believe they take a step back.

First year HCs almost always struggle to maintain their predecessors’ success. Herman at UH was an enigma with the right talent and energy; UT may have saved us a little in poaching him so quickly. I think he would have struggled to duplicate his first year here if he had stayed.

I also don’t think Memphis can simply plug new guys in to replace Miller and Ferguson without a drop off. That was a unique QB/WR combo that isn’t easily replicated.

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I trust his judgement since he is in practice. 10-2 means if we stay relatively healthy free… 12-0.

if he stayed last year’s team would have went to a new years 6 bowl game but that’s another story.

i agree with you about Memphis. they are getting a tad bit overrated. its a good chance when we face them they could have 2 losses in the aac (navy and ucf). possibly 3 (Tulane).

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Half the team could have had a concussion, then what? Seriously, I think we might have won 9 last year with him in the same situation. King was still injured at the beginning of the year and Allen was still Allen between the ears, i.e. making bad choices.

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I think our toughest AAC games are at Navy and Temple here. USF will be down from last year. If we win the West (see the above) it’s a walk at UCF. At Lubbock will really define the strength of this team.

But that is the flaw in most any fan analysis. Everyone knows much more about UH than we know about our opponents. The failed assumption usually being, if we look better than last year, our record will be that much better than last year.

That is why I try not to make season long predictions and especially not predict early games like Rice and Arizona. All we have to go on is how they played last year as well.

they wouldn’t have lost to Tulane, Tulsa and Memphis how they did and that’s for sure. they would have beaten tech as well.

But would have lost to someone like UConn or SMU, right?

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don’t want to make this another herman thread again so i’ll say this for the final time. the UConn lost would have been a W if the qb’s were healthy. we saw how good herman can be without distractions.

We will lose 1 game and it will be somebody stupid.

We’ll deal with Memphis when we need to. I am curious to see how their QB situation plays out.

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As JD said in the article, he doesn’t know much, because all practices and scrimmages have been closed to the media.

If Ward had stayed healthy, we may or may not have beat UConn, but we certainly would have lost to Memphis right? Stop trying to revise the past. If Herman was still here, he would still be spending more time acting like a celebrity and doing job interviews than getting the team ready for the next game.

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Sounds like it already has played out. Yesterday Norvell announced that Brady White won the job and David Moore decided to transfer.

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Personally I don’t see us losing to Texas Tech. In my opinion, their offense takes a step back to start the year and they will gel much better as the years goes on. I think their defense will be much better this year, but as we saw last year a good defense will only get you so far.

So since we have them earlier in the season I feel like our offense will be clicking much better than theirs and our defense will be better than theirs and therefore we will walk away with a 10 to 14 point victory.

I think the rice game will allow everyone to get a chance to play and really get things ironed out with the new offense. I think Arizona will obviously kick it up a notch for us but I don’t see them beating us. I feel like we will get up early and if they are forced to pass then they’re going to be in trouble. Our defense will stop the run and I don’t think Tate is good enough to bring them from behind with his arm.

Week three when we play Texas Tech, we will feel pretty confident about ourselves and really start coming into our own. I feel the offense will be clicking pretty good and our defense will feed off that even more. From then on we just need to keep our player’s heads level and we run the table one game at a time.

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