If we had WF schedule we would be 4-0 and TV guru's would be touting our next big game. We have a tough schedule this year and next but this team is very competitive. The Ole Miss score does not really show how close that game was until almost over. We had a good shot at Louisville but did not execute in the second half. May have gone conservative and players thought it was over at the half.
Take the polls and the prediction models with a grain of salt until week 6 or 7. Even before, they’re mostly right with a few outliers.
If you rank teams just based on the wins, you can play that “transitive win” game that ranks Kansas over Alabama. That gets silly results.
Four straight years of losing records and three of the worst years in school history out of the last five (four) play as big a factor in our ratings and rankings as us being 2-2.
You can probably find my post before the game where I said Wake hadn’t played anyone, and we’d probably be 4-0 with their schedule. That doesn’t mean Wake is worse than us—just that they played a much weaker schedule.
If we played a rematch this week, I expect Vegas would still favor Wake by 3.
I like us better than Wake, but we’re pretty evenly matched.
If you choose to believe that the Ole Miss game was closer than the final score, that’s your option. The good news is we’re a much better team than last year. They whipped us though.
We had a good shot at Louisville. We still lost. The vocal majority of the board wanted Thacker fired after the game.
To paraphrase Dennis Green, Bill Belichick, Bill Parcells, and others: you are what the score says you are.
Moral victories don’t help much. Maybe Louisville turns out to be good, but that’s still a game we needed.
FWIW, the polls rank Duke over Clemson. The prediction models don’t, and mostly still have Clemson in the top 25.
If we want to change perception, winning Bowling Green comfortably and then beating Miami would do it. Beating Wake helps, but it doesn’t undo losing to Ole Miss by double digits and losing to Louisville
If you averaged the opinions on this board over the last four games, for the first three games Key was a safe choice we made because we were cheap, the defensive coaches didn’t know what they were doing, and we had mostly the same coaches and players from Collins. This week, the coaches and players are good. Those were the majority of post-game comments, and I’m not including the chat room.
The difference with the pollsters is that they remember our first three games and our last five years
I’m very happy we beat Wake and really enjoyed the game. I’m not going to get bent out of shape because people and models still want us to “prove it” after the last 5 years. We’re closing in on average in perceptions; to be “good” we need to beat teams we should beat and notch quality wins
Wake is a good win, but it’s not a top 25 win. It’s a top 50 win
For the first three weeks, I was saying things aren’t as bad as people think. This week I’m saying it takes time to adjust the polls and the models, and they base it on our track record.
The last few years of our history will be in the polls and the models until the latter half of the season. We’re only 1/3rd in
