That's funny.
Were you the one wanting to fire Howland the other day? Not sure but was thinking so.
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Bama is the only school that should present an enormous obstacle for us in the West. We have shown we can beat Auburn regularly under Mullen, even without as good recruting. We have shown we can compete with LSU, as even in losses we have come close. We have shown we can compete with aTm.
I absolutely do not concede that losing to anyone other than Bama under Saban is "written in the stars". Dan is really good at some things, but steps on his own dick in enough things to narrowly lose some games we could otherwise win. If he would learn from those mistakes and adjust (including recruiting/staff/game management), we could absolutely compete for the West on occasion. Even if we lose to Bama nearly every game, we'd still have a shot in those years where Bama slips vs others, or we manage to beat them.
Cadaver, nobody is suggesting we should beat Bama, LSU, AU, etc every time we play them. But we should believe we can do it often enough to either compete for the SEC West, compete for a spot in the playoffs as a 2nd SEC team, or make a NY6 game 2-4 times per decade.
With Mullen we are likely to continue to get fantastic QB play...a key ingredient. We have traditionally been a very good team on defense, so need to get back to that. Hopefully Grantham will get us there. We have traditionally had very-good-to-great RB's. We've recently done fairly well at WR, and with Dan's rep for developing and now attracting top QB's, that should improve.
We really need to improve on the O-line. Even with sporadic success, we all know the o-line talent has mostly been not-so-great. If we could just get that solved, we have a great chance to compete.
With better o-line talent on a consistent basis and a return to at least decent defense, we should be able to get it done. Is it really crazy to think we can't?
When the hell could we compete with powerhouses every year? Before Dan beat LSU we couldn't even beat them with Dinardo. We beat bama a couple times in Jackies tenure but they were coming off of probation and sucked and we still couldn't beat them for the west one year and they were absolutely average. The only legit team Jackie beat that would even possibly compare to present day bama was UF and they were but a shell of what Bama is now.
We have never competed with powerhouses every year. Never. I just posted our records over the last 26 years what about those records screams competing with powerhouses? Have you looked at our all time record vs LSU and Alabama? Hell look at our record vs vandy, Ky, USC E, and Ole Miss. We have struggled to historically compete with the worst teams in the SEC until fairly recently.
Since 1990 records vs SEC west opp.
OM 14-13
LSU 4-23
Bama 6-20
Auburn 8-16
Arkansas 7-16-1
Mullen has brought us to be around a top 30 football program and that is our ceiling.
And for all of the talk about how great the SEC was, at least for 2016, second place in the SEC West was there for the taking for any West team that could have gotten their crap together. The SEC wasn't anything to write home about this year. Unfortunately we weren't ready to get ours together.
We can't. We can't make Mullen be Nick Saban. I mean that's really what's going on here. We can't beat Saban and we won't ever beat Saban so y'all are just melting over and over between the difference of winning 8-9 games or winning 10 games a year. 99 years outta 100 we are going to lose atleast 2 games a year. One vs Saban and one vs whoever else in the SEC is having their Cam Newton year. I am not going to be a victim to that frustration any longer. It is what it is and what it is is that we can't beat Nick Saban. Ever. Good for him for turning college football into UConn women's basketball. Yay little midget Saban with an undying inferiority complex. Yea for being borderline insane Nick Saban. Yay for toeing the line of cheating in every possible aspect of college football that you make sure you have a competitive advantage in everything. Yay Nick Saban for getting 400 coaches fired and counting. Yay Nick Saban for giving the people in the state of Alabama something more valuable to them than their own wife/husband/dog/cat. Yay!!!!