Quote Originally Posted by Coach34 View Post
Texas Tech went 6-5 the year before Leach. No bowl game because of lack of bowl games then. Leach went 7-6 the next season thanks to a 12th game being added.

Washington State was 4-8 the year before Leach. Leach went 3-9 the next season- 1 game worse than the previous coach as he began to flip the roster

To think he will suddenly improve State by 2-3 games in Year 1 with our roster is lunacy.
the difference is neither Tech nor WSU had the advantage of having 6 and maybe 7 games where they had a talent advantage. We have major talent issues for an SEC team and we probably aren't going to be competitive against good SEC teams. But we are not G5 team bad. We have 3 games we should win OOC. NCSt gets to return a lot of players but they were pretty bad last year. Arkansas is a mess and basically hired their version of Matt Luke. Not saying he won't be successful, but it's asking a lot to expect him to turn that team around in one year. Ole Miss has a new coach but they have significant talent issues. We squeaked out a win against them this year when we had Moorhead and they had one pretty good and one really good coordinator. UK was better than us by the end of this year, but we still out talented them (hence us being able to win, even at home, because we sure as hell didn't outcoach them).

We probably aren't winning 8 because there are a lot of unknowns, but we should win six and getting to 8 wouldn't take some incredible string of luck. It would require our players responding to coaching and having the ball bounce our way in our two toughest toss up games. Or alternatively snagging a good transfer WR or finding out that coaching was holding our WRs back and they aren't as bad as they've looked.

The lack of talent in our WR corp is our biggest issue to me. If we had an average group of SEC receivers, I think we'd likely be an 8 win team even with the transition issues and talent issues on D. We just don't have to be that good of a team next year to win 8 games. We'd have to be much, much better to win 9 games (or have a horse shoe stuck up our ass), but we play 8 not very good teams next year.