I’ll take it…
I think that is fair. This year has the feeling of being a good year. We are good and under the radar, that historically has been a good combination for us.
We play:
124 Rice
32 Arizona
51 Texas Tech
Unr TSU
95 Tulsa
120 ECU
54 Navy
43 USF
87 SMU
57 Temple
90 Tulane
39 Memphis
Surprised they have both Toledo and Northern Illinois ahead of Memphis.
Boise State at #14 and UCF at #27 caught my attention.
They need to explain USF, and it needs to be done without the usual “Charlie Strong, and Flowers are both gone but they return a ton of talent” lazy rhetoric. We were better than them last year ( I said this multiple times before we played them), why wouldn’t we be better than them this year with more returning players in key roles?
Charlie is still USF HC.
Besides Flowers: 2 huge losses.
They will miss Deadrin Senat-clogging up the middle & pushing the pocket.
Had @10 tackles for loss/66 tackles & 6 sacks as a DT
Marquez Valdes-Scantling- USF season record for yards last year also career record for yards per catch. (close to 200 vs UH)
Big & fast.
My mistake. lol I was thinking of last year when the media guys said that about Taggart leaving.
Darius Tice (RB), Jeremy Hall (1st Team ALL AAC-Guard), Bruce Hector and Mike Love, who combined for 18.5 sacks are gone as well. It’s worth mentioning that their leading tackler, Auggie Sanchez (LB) is also gone. I like our odds in the Cage this year.
We may have beaten them on the field but in other ways we were worse. Their only other loss was to undefeated UCF. If we want to argue we should be ranked higher than them, we cant lose to teams like Tulsa and Tulane
Makes sense. However, we did beat them, and we are not Tulsa and Tulane, who both had worse records than us. Do you honestly think we we’re that bad as a team last year? We had plenty of ups and downs. You don’t beat USF, shootout with Memphis, and beat one of the best offenses in the AAC (SMU), and be a bad team. We just need more consistent play.
“Just”? Plus better play calling, a running game, a defense that can stop a high school passing attack, and a dozen other things. We should be better on offense but defense is still a BIG question.
Not a bad team, but bad playcalling. Had Lark dropped that ball, the game would have been over.
We werent as bad as Tulsa and Tulane, but we lost to them and 3 other teams. We beat USF but they only had 2 losses, both to bowl teams and one to an undefeated team.
We may be better than them this year, but 7-5 with 2 bad losses to teams USF beat vs 10-2 with losses to good teams says USF was better overall last year
I agree defense has to return to the attacking 3-4 that we have come to expect.
We should not have lost to those teams, point, blank, period. We also should have beat USF (like we did) , because of match ups. If CMA would have had this team prepared (that includes holding assistants accountable) we could have possibly won 10 games this year. I don’t want to hear anything about us being so much better this year because of CKB, when in fact, we should have beat Tulsa and Tulane with CBJ. It all boils down to preparation.