Going into the season, we thought/knew we had
(1) a QB that is still growing in the passing game,
(2) a big time question mark at RT and somewhat of a question at LG,
(3) a very weak receiving corp made of mostly good #3 or serviceable #2 receivers,
(4) question marks in the secondary,
(5) a defense that was going to take time to gel because it consisted of new comers and people coached by Peter 17ing Sirmon for the past year.
(6) a team that was probably going to win 6-8 games, and that would be ready to challenge everybody but the elite in 2018, and maybe even could challenge the elite in 2018 if the right things fell into place as far as OL development and WR signees.

So basically, we killed LSU, and many people (including me, thought we might be elite), and then we played UGA, and figured out we aren't elite, but that we might be pretty good, and then we played Auburn, and found out we are exactly what we though before a season. The only thing that is different from the beginning of the season is that we have confirmed we are just an ok team that is one year away, and we now know that SECW is as terrible as it's been since A&M got here, and we could legitimately win 9 games with a mediocre team (although realistically we'll probably slip up at least one if not two along the way).

The reality is that the die was cast for this year a few years ago with Mullen's recruiting. Mullen let things get away from him, and it appears that he has his ass in gear after either bad luck or losing a little bit of his fire resulted in a 2015 without a O-line for the first half or a RB for the entire season and a cluster 17 of a 2016 season.

But we were not one year from a fix last year, and things are going pretty well considering how bad Mullen had let the talent get. We were bailed out by a JUCO signing class that filled in some holes other than OL and WR. This is basically the best case realistic scenario from where we were after the USA game in 2016. It sucks that we are not competitive against good teams, but why did anyone think we would be after the shit year we had last year. The only outstanding gripe I see is that we still have the O-line coach that has left us paper thin on the OL and one offensive lineman short of a starting 17ing lineup, but we have improved OL recruiting some, even if we are still not signing enough to give us a chance to have a full starting lineup and an adequate number of backups, and maybe the Looney hiring is putting Hev on notice. All in all, we are doing ok considering how bad it got last year.

The TLDR version is this is way better than I expected a year ago, and I'm not going to let LSU suckering us into thinking we are better than average stop me from enjoying a season where we are going to win ~8 games the year before what should be our peak season.