I'll answer the question posed in the title:
Offense is an upward trajectory. We need to figure out the QB situation and I would like to see some coaching changes on the OLine. We return everyone except Ricky, JJ, and Shamire. We'll hopefully have Andrew Marshall back healthy and the freshmen coming off their redshirts to help the depth. Jerry is going to be a star one day so I think BBack will be better as well. A-Backs might be worse without JJ, but it seems like Clinton Lynch just isn't 100% this year. If he's healthy I think we can be even better there. Jalen and Brad can hold down the fort, but we have some really excited freshmen that we can hopefully get involved.
Hopefully we don't have the unexpected attrition like we did with Eason, Trey Klock, Marcus Marshall, and Dedrick leaving last year.
Special teams: I honestly don't know. Can't be worse?
Defense: this is going to take a hit. We will be replacing lots of Seniors. We have some guys for the secondary but we don't seem to have any depth at DE. This was the year to see what a deep, experienced defense was like under the current staff. This is the peak, and it's going to be down hill going into next year.
So next year, assuming coaching is the same, I would expect our defense to be closer to 2016 levels with the amount of new faces we'll see. I see our offense opening up more, depending on QB, and being maybe closer to 2016 levels. If we have some coaching changes then I really like our talent level on O and on D so I think we could be in store for a special year with a favorable schedule.