Undone

I expect to go 6-6. Martinez needs to retrain himself on how to protect the ball when he's running with the rock. Special teams have to be significantly better than they have been the past two years. Defense has to be at minimum as good as it was last year. Those are my expectations, and I think they're pretty low. If Frost can't accomplish those things I don't want to talk about firing him or anything like that, but I'll have pretty much completely lost faith in his abilities to pinpoint the main problems and to execute a plan to fix them.

Here's my restructuring list: Frost: 1st Head Coach Runner-Up & Supreme Meme Lord Tom Osborne: Head Coach & Assistant Meme Lord Tom Osborne: New QB Analyst Tom Osborne: New Offensive Coordinator Tom Osborne: WR Coach Tom Osborne: Dedicated ST Coach

Agreed there - good points.

And that is not a mere arbitrary analytic. One tendency people have is to just assume Smothers is coming along well and is poised to really be a reliable QB2 based on one or two random quotes by coaches. Friendly reminder: We saw the same dynamic with the assumptions about McCaffrey until he finally got significant time at QB...and then we learned he didn't really have what it took to be a starting Big 10 quarterback any time soon. Here's to hoping that Logan Smothers actually is a viable option as a QB2 and also a viable option as the starter in a couple y

Gotcha, I figured it had to do with the perception of better draft prospects. When you're that good of an athlete but you're maybe on the edge of the NFL cut, you need any advantage you can get to get that contract, no doubt.

Be that as it may, you now get the ball on the 25 if you fair catch it anywhere inside the 25. So when you lack a 'Barry Sanders' on your team and you also have undisciplined blockers/poorly coached blocking scheme, you should probably just take the fair catch most of the time when they kick it deep.

Probably gonna get a lot of crap for this comment, but I ask in earnest: Why would Toure transfer here for his senior year? Did Montana graduate a really good QB last season or something?

No, the opposite. Choosing to return balls that land inside the 3 yard line should be fair caught unless - as you say - you have a really good returner. *Edit: And probably even inside the 5, period.

Yes, especially when you're already playing from behind in any given game. The risk/reward ratio just isn't favorable. And in my opinion this falls squarely back onto bad coaching and bad in-game adjustments. If we watch this same stuff next season and we also have another losing season it will absolutely lead to hands down the lowest point in the program.

Yep, this. As @Husker in WI said, field position differential metrics are well-applied here. And I don't have those stats to share right now, admittedly, but the eyeball test tells me we were indeed typically not on top in that element. Combine that with a team prone to committing dumb penalties and also fairly consistently being negative in the turnover margin, it's just hard to have a winning season.

Sure, I getcha. I won't sit here and make the argument that it "affected every team in the country equally." I originally said: I agree that it affected different teams in different ways, sure.

I can't disagree with that logic, I guess. But I personally don't apply it as an excuse for having had a 3-5 conference game record.

Fair enough; but "young roster" has nothing to do with COVID (with which I'm sure you will agree).

Ok, I buy that. Still a good example of a game in my opinion where there doesn't seem to be any tangible "COVID excuses" that the 'skers can use for why we lost. It was down the stretch of the season, both teams had played several games at that point, etc., etc.

I've said this now way too many times on this forum and I said in the OP of this thread, but I still think special teams was again the weakest unit in 2020. Still can't tell if our kicker is struggling to consistently kick the ball down to around the goal line or whether he was being coached to loft it a bit higher and shorter and then let our coverage unit try to pin them deep. But either way, it didn't work. Then when we're returning kickoffs, we're constantly trying to take the ball out and getting pinned inside the 25 and sometimes even the 20. You combine that with