Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="RF2044, post: 1364254, member: 40"] Go, I'm not trying to be argumentative, but honestly--do you believe that statement is true? I certainly don't--not after what we saw last year. Full disclosure, before last season, I DID believe that our skilled talent was good enough for us to get to 7-8 wins. But considering how things turned out... Let's examine your point above. We certainly are NOT better at QB than we were 3 years ago [Nassib], or 5 years ago [Paulus was better than Hunt was last year]. 10 years ago, we're talking about the Andrew Robinson's / Cody Catalina's / David Legree's of the world -- I don't think it is clear that Hunt [last year only] was even better than that motley crew, given his on-field performance. It was that bad. And once he went down, and we promptly ran through the other three QBs at various times, I think it is fair to question whether our situation at QB was any better than it was 10 years ago--which was as poor of an era of football in program history. I like Prince Tyson-Gulley--a lot. I think he was misused last year, and wasn't given the ball nearly enough. I also think that his numbers suffered as a function of the high level of OL injuries. Despite that, I'm not sure that PTG, as much as I liked him, was honestly any better than the RBs we've had for the past 10 years. We've had thousand yard runner after thousand yard runner. Very solid players like Curtis Brinkley, Delone Carter, Damien Rhodes, Antwon Bailey, even Jerome Smith. Quality backs. PTG had some impressively long runs. Love the kid. But I don't know that he was necessarily "better" than his predecessors from the previous 10 years. At WR, we were awful. Flat out awful. Some of that was on the QBs, but a lot of it had to do with the talent. West had a fantastic year [even though he finished with ZERO touchdowns]. Ismael was a true frosh, and he flashed. That's about it. Nobody else did anything noteworthy. Was that really better than three years ago, when we had Lemon / Sales? Hell no. You can make the case that it was better than the Rice Moss / Tim Lane era of 10 years ago, but BFD -- that was the nadir of our WR talent. We'd better be better than that sorry level... and we marginally were, but not much more. Again, I just think some are significantly overestimating the skilled offensive talent on this team, top to bottom, across every positional unit. I was just as guilty of that prior to last year, expecting Hunt to have a big season and the skilled players to be more solid than they were. But the proof is in the pudding, and last year's group of skilled talent compares unfavorably with as poor of talent as we had even 10 years ago, at the pinnacle of our decline. That's a big problem--especially as we try to climb back to respectability. The entire group has a LOT of proving to do this year. It will be interesting to see whether Ismael, Custis, Enoicy, Morris, McFarlane, Dunk, Parris, Hunt, etc. can deliver better contributions than what we got last year from our skilled "talent." Given last year's performance, I think there are a lot of unfounded attributions being made about how good the skilled talent on the team was. They were below average, at best--especially compared to high performing programs. I'm not sure how that can be legitimately debated, all you have to do is watch college football beyond our games. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?