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Message: [QUOTE="RF2044, post: 1364079, member: 40"] #1, I never find arguments convincing when its suggested that you throw away a subset of the data to paint the rest of the data in a flattering light. Talk about artificial confirmatory bias. #2, generally yards are a pretty good indicator of wins--but last year was a complete exception. Precisely because we couldn't score points. That was a season long problem, it wasn't just attributable to after injuries set in. The offensive skilled talent stunk from the opening kickoff of the first game and struggled for the entire rest of the year. Generally speaking that was a season long trend. #3, to highlight the offensive futility, consider the following: how many TDs did our running backs score last season? How many after the opening game, which was against a FCS opponent? How many TD passes did our QBs throw? How many total TDs did we score as a team? The output was pathetic. Yes, injures played a part. So did coaching. But the main reason was lack of talent. If those players hadn't gotten injured, would it have improved the offensive production? Undoubtedly, but that would only put lipstick on a pig. The results still would have sucked. #4, one of the main reasons we amassed so many yards in the first 2/3 of games is that we were often behind--significantly, and we threw because we had to. Opposing teams were willing to concede meaningless yards between the 20s, because we couldn't score. In large part because our skilled offensive talent was subpar. #5, another reason we amassed so many yards in the first 2/3 of games is that we were pretty good at forcing turnovers. Which in turn led to an artificially high number of possessions in several games. But unfortunately, we couldn't do anything substantive with the ball because, again, we lacked talent and couldn't score. I honestly think that people get so hung up on trying to point to one root cause / magic bullet and one root cause only that they slap blinders on and pretend that other issues weren't as significant as they actually were. Any attempt to paint our skilled talent as anything more than decidedly [B]below average[/B] is misguided. Even our peer programs had game breakers. My kingdom for a Stefan Diggs, because a player like that--even just ONE player like that--would literally transform our offensive gameplan and make us exponentially more difficult to defend. I'm a serial optimist--one of the more positive people on the forum when it comes to football and our team's chances. But I don't know how anyone could have experienced last year and not come away with the conclusion that our skilled talent is significantly lower than even our peer programs, let alone top 25 caliber programs. The fact that there were other significant problems contributing to our offensive woes too doesn't alter that fact. [/QUOTE]

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