You realize you’re kinda doing the same thing here, right? You have a problem with people criticizing your criticisms. You’re free to say whatever you want. Everyone else if free to tell you what they think about it.
If Mertz's trajectory continues up and the D continues improving, this team can get a good bowl game or more. Projecting forward, I have said this before, if Mertz stays for his RS senior year, Lagway will have zero pressure on him and will be allowed to learn the playbook and possibly RS.
I pretty much agree entirely with your take, but I really like the potential and growth I see in this young team. After three games, I don't see any other team in the SEC the same way I did in the preseason. IMO, at this point there are no obvious "super teams". But there are several teams that have a chance of being considerably better than expected - and UF is one of them. I picked UF 7-5 if we opened up at 4-2,...8-4 with a 5-1 going into the second half of the season. I'm leaning more toward 8-4 after seeing the physicality and surprisingly good play of the D.
Kicking and late play calls will still cost us. I had us at 1-11 and I’m sticking with it! reverse psychology
It turns out that the best way to slow a mobile QB down may be to dominate TOP while consistently scoring points while doing so. He can't do much sitting on the bench. Generally speaking, if our front seven can nullify a quality running game, we can make life difficult for almost any QB.
If ends up being a W, then who cares?… it was the right call. Everyone who watched that game knew who the better team was. If it resulted in a L, then it’s open season. Id be right there with you.
Why care, the same reason we want the special teams to be fixed. We missed an xp and fg but won, doesn't mean that won't bite us in the future.
Rattler is super flashy and super erratic. Last year we killed him and the next week he went off on UT. Against UGA he looked great early and was neutered in the second half. I wouldn’t hitch my train to him, he reminds me of Franks but not a tough.
While UK has really had 3 lopsided wins they have played 3 directional level schools. The three teams they have played have won a combined 2 games. Not sure how much can be made of them yet.
Smack took over kicking last night and he’s 100% so far. I don’t know if that’s permanent or not but it could be yet another positive.
What is this “should have lost” crap? I hate that phrase. I mean why should we have lost it? It was our players running all over theirs. It was our players dominating the first half. For some reason we shut it down too and went into a semi prevent way too early. If anything we should have won by more. I knew the general public would look at this game wrong. The general public is known by the people that bet that big money so they knew there where better money when it was 14 to open and went down to 7 and I still woulda dropped a dime on the money line (straight up without getting points to the uninitiated). Looks quite to me like we should have won, by a lot!
Hooker was good and he is no longer there. They aren’t a top ten team. Their defense was almost as bad as ours last year and aren’t that good this year either. Milton isn’t very good either.