So you are saying we do worse than last year what make you think we were more talented last year?
My opinion is not based on that assumption inside your question. Whether or not we are more talented than last year doesn't necessarily equate to more wins.
We are 10th in the ACC according to Ken Pom and predicted to finish 9th or 10th.
8 of our ACC games are against teams ranked in the top 18. Those are 8 super difficult games.
We play Clemson twice, Wake Forest twice, and we play NC State, @ Boston College, & @ Pittsburgh once. Those are 8 very winnable games.
The remaining two games are home against Syracuse and @ Florida State.
Assuming we win a couple we shouldn't, but lose a couple road games that we shouldn't, you end up somewhere around 8-10.
We are 4-1 and our 8 remaining OOC games are Grambling State, Tennessee, Wofford, Florida A&M, Georgia, Wright State, Coppin State, and Yale. If we go 6-2, that makes us 10-3 plus 8-10 = 18-13. That means to match last year's 21 wins, we need to win 3 games in the post season (ACC Tournament, NCAA or NIT Tournament).
And personally, I just don't see us running the table on our easier games. Which means we need to beat a top 18 team at home a couple of times to offset that. Maybe we can, maybe we can't. If we learned anything from last year, its that this team could improve immensely between now and 3 months from now. But when I see 18-20 wins as seeming like a ceiling, its hard to have a lot of confidence in such a prediction.
Plus, I prefer to set my expectations low. I'd rather predict 6-12 or 7-11 and 18 total wins and then beat it than to predict 9-9 or 10-8 and 21 wins and then miss it.
Anyways, that's a lot of speculation based upon nothing I guess.