Undone

I getcha. Although, individual improvement for Milton/Martinez is of course related to but also quite different than dissecting the offense's overall improvement for both teams. I'll mainly be measuring Marinez's improvement by looking at completion percentage (which honestly was already insanely good in year one), reading defenders a bit better so as to not throw into coverage, and making good calls on zone read running plays. Those pretty much mainly are analyzed in a vacuum by themselves except for offensive line play. If the line doesn't hold up, it's hard to blame the quarterback as much. So personally I see that as being a much bigger factor than the skill players around Martinez in the context of Martinez's continue development. But, all of your points make sense.

The OP's theory actually isn't that bad. It's pretty much a hodge podge roster right now heading into year 2 with some leftovers from Riley that honestly aren't very talented / some really, really good incoming true freshmen / some guys that redshirted last year that are honestly just total unknowns one way or the other. If Duvall & Greg Austin can get our big guys into that nasty, gritty mindset headed into September and Martinez has time to throw the ball, we will seriously destroy probably 8 out of the 12 teams on our schedule with a floor of a nine win season. If they don't...Martinez isn't going to just dance around and win games all by himself, no matter how badly the fan base wants to believe that.

Yep, I agree that there are some precedents there for sure. Just as an aside to this specific incident, I've been wondering for the last six months-ish if there's a specific set of team rules that provide hard and fast lines in the sand for suspension/dismissal. I really don't know the answer.

I'm pretty sure everyone understands this but in this context 'best bet' means the best combination of odds to payout ratio, not "most likely to actually win the title."

@Nebfanatic - It's good info. It's not necessarily a one-for-one parallel because in that case, there was an actual drug test mandated by the NCAA, so that's a clear cut question of rules violations.

There are team rules and then there are legal violations. This is a broad generalization but typically fans fail to distinguish between the two. I'd been contemplating whether at any point Frost will have concluded that Mo has broken any specific team rule with his stuff from 2018. This is again the same question - are there team rules specific to drug use? I'd be surprised if there aren't. So while as someone who thinks Nebraska should fully legalize marijuana use I don't think this is actually a big deal at all technically, the question is, is this a violation of team rule? Going to be interesting to find out.

Winning the West this year has a lot to do also with Iowa & Wisconsin both playing two & three tough games for their cross-divisional match-ups, respectively. Iowa plays Michigan & Penn State. Wisconsin plays Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State. Wisconsin in my opinion has incredibly low odds of winning the West this season. I do think Athlon has it correct with us & Iowa fighting for the West title. If we beat them, I predict they'll have four conference losses and we'll have three, and we'll be the ones going to Indy.

Ha, that's a good take on it actually.

It'll be interesting to see whether they'll stick with an offensive scheme that resembled more of a 'Texas Mack Brown' style passing spread that they had with Haskins, or if they'll go back to more of the Power Run Spread that they had ran more of in most of Meyer's previous seasons there. I do think they'll struggle a bit, comparatively speaking for them. But heading into the season they are undoubtedly the top team in the conference no matter what anyone says. This is a simple function of their recruiting classes, year in year out. But still, I'm expecting them to struggle a bit offensively in the first half of the season.

Was mainly just thinking about if what he's doing at Clemson was translated over to OU currently. Obviously that's a lot of hypotheticals, I know.

I mean, there's no way to know yet. We basically know nothing of what's going to transpire in his hearings.

Yep. Imagine if Brent Venables had been convinced to stay on as DC...

By and large it's the proximity to the Texas recruiting hotbed. Existing brand name + sitting right on top of Texas + not hiring an idiot = still being a Top 5 team.

...then we probably aren't going to be nearly as good as we thought on offense this season.

So much of it is about player motivation. A culture change often times changes the work ethic of the player and puts a drive in them to where when they step out onto the field, they "can't be beat, won't be beat." We haven't had that mentality on defense for roughly 5+ seasons. I don't know whether we have it coming into this season or not; we'll see in a few months.