Quote Originally Posted by Maroonthirteen View Post
Bottom line, Moorhead did a good job.

Some may not want to hear this, but an 8 win season is a good season. Any way you slice it.

I agree with anonymous. Defensively, we were hell. But we busted a coverage in the outback that cost us big time. So we weren?t perfect. Offensively our passing game was terrible for
Many reasons and not just on one guy.

Moorhead had a successful first year.
That's a negative. You can't say he did a good job based on getting 8 wins without comparing it to what a likely other hire would have done. Our schedule was set up to where we had basically 6 games where our talent would have made it hard to lose. One game where our talent made it almost impossible to win, one game where it would have been hard, and then 4 you could say were reasonably close talent wise. So basically he split the games where talent was reasonably close and wasn't competitive for the game that would have been hard to win. It's a little worse than that if you look at the fact that his side of the ball made us not competitive in those two losses and well as didn't give us a chance against LSU. In the two we did win, we put up 23 while holding the other team to 9, and 28 while holding the other team to 13, both pretty solid compared to how other SEC teams scored against them.

Moorhead had an ok first year. It's hard to say what our defense would have looked like without Shoop, but he probably did within a game better or worse than say the handful of other potential hires would have done. He looks better from the fact that he had our offense where it could destroy weak teams. It looks worse that it was non-existent in our four regular season losses. It looks worse that he was incapable of adjusting against UK. It looks better that he did something different against Auburn.

The way his offense did against weak defenses was a very good sign. That will hopefully put a pretty high floor underneath us. I'm not bothered by him not being able to score against Bama. You're just not going to score against good defenses that are playing well when you have basically zero legit SEC WRs. I'm bothered by the fact that he couldn't put in a couple of packages to get us some minimal production against UK and UF, which is all it would have taken on offense and which our running game talent was good enough to do. I'm pleased that he's recruiting at a level that it looks like will maintain or improve our talent (well, probably not to the point of having 3 1st rounders again, but overall, should be good). I'm worried that the one thing he really needed to do, which is bring in an impact WR didn't happen.

I think he will be solid to good if we give him time to get some pieces here. I don't think people are going to be happy with the performance next year and probably the year after that, unless we find an impact WR ready to play in 2020.