Just to improve on last year we need to win 5. I see us being better than last year.
Here's my rationale: we won 3 games last year, with 1 game being cancelled, one game with us seriously handicapped, and 1 game with 3 weeks off but not 3 weeks of practice). We dropped one game last year that was essentially a guaranteed win. I see last year's team as a 4-5 win team (Gardner Webb and I'm not conceding the Miami game that was cancelled).
So, here's my take...we're better than we were last year. All of our young guys have more experience and we've added key pieces through transfers. I am not knocking any of our guys from last year that aren't here this year, but other than punter, we've probably improved at every position. That isn't necessarily true for all the teams on our schedule. I will be shocked if this team doesn't win 6 games. We were playing much better towards the end of the season than we were at the beginning and that was with true freshmen all over the field.
I still will not concede a single loss, but I can easily reconcile in my preseason, gold-colored, ever-optimistic mind an 8 or 9 win season with a decent bowl. We're starting so low that we'll never reach the ranked (unless we start like 6-1 or something), but I think this year will fold nicely into next year when we play for the National Championship. Bobby Ross showed us how to do it in 4 years, so I don't see why we can't (maybe it will be 5 years, but no more than that!
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