In Reply to: It's all fair. posted by hotspot on July 23, 2025 at 15:50:33
I'm looking for a bit more than that. The Indiana game was the only game last year we really got blown out in, tho I won't argue much if you want to say the Penn St game wasn't competitive (tho, with any sort of offense, we're tied or even ahead at the half, the defense was playing so well). Even the Oregon game we were driving to make a 1 score game towards the end of the 3rd quarter.
The rest of the games we were all in, and could have won if we had played better on offense in just the second half.It's a main reason we fired our OC and OL coaches. LSU, Minnesota, UW, SC were all winnable games, as were the ones we actually won ;). We were a lot closer to a 9-3/8-4 season than it looked (of course, we could also have lost to Hawai'i, Rutgers, Nebraska and Iowa, so we were also pretty close to 1-11).
Ultimately, I really do blame EB and Castillo for us going from #1 in the Pac12 to almost dead last in D-1 in running the ball last year and I do think the running game (and OL play) will be greatly improved - it's no coincidence that our best win (Iowa) was keyed by our best running game of the year.
But, Malloe is going to have to keep the defense from backsliding too much. I think he will.