I donāt post here much, but I did want to give my opinion on the season as a casual observer alumni in New York.
With WKU, FIU, and FAU we were able to hang in the first half. Everything fell apart in the second half. This tells me a couple of things. 1) We are stretched thin both from talent, and from injuries. 2) We have not had the ability to finish acclimating to FBS endurance, whether itās because we jumped so quickly, Lambertās staff did a poor job, or our talent just needs more work. We are doing fine in the first half, minus a few stupid mistakes.
As an alumni not in NC, and with no real ability to fly down for a weekend game, I do feel the change in the wind with Healy. His first season at AP wasnāt spectacular, but his second season was, and I feel the same can be said with us. We have some gems on the team, and a clear change in environment. I am still hopeful we can get 4-5 wins total for the year, which would be fine this year. The real test of Healyās tenure will be the offseason leading into next year.
solid post, nyc. i agree with much of what you said. unfortunately, some of those gems on the team will be gone after this season, i.e., highsmith and lemay but we do return a good amount of talent, mostly at rb and wr. totally agree about this offseason being important for future success. we need to end up with around 15, 3 star players in this class, which i think is doable. we also need to add some jucos and grad transfers, guys who can contribute early so we donāt have to rely on young guys. we also need another qb who can actually push reynolds, not like kean pushed him but a guy who is better.
Iād say that is still competitive since they were both below 2 TD scores. And really, if I recall there were TDs in the last couple of minutes of the first half. So, I guess I was just going by that context. I still think we matched well with FIU, FAU, and WKU. It sucked that App and Clemson happened just before these games. Talk about deflating.
I thought our defense looked better Saturday than it has the past 2 games. Drive killing penalties on offense and drive extending penalties on defense killed us along with the blocked punt. Special teams have been special all year so Iām not sure there is any cleaning that up. Comes back to lack of depth I guess.
Both FAU and FIU scored Tdās in the last minutes of the half. As did App.
Western kicked FG and even GW and Umass scores before halftime.
Again, one if the the few positives Lambert ever did was emphasizing possession of the ball last season. We did this on the first drive against Western, but we were unable to replicate that first drive.