For me the honeymoon ended last season. The Holiday Bowl was a horrific event in our collective football modern history, but the reality is we were an under motivated team playing some scrubs from the Pac-10 we'd already beaten silly once before. Our limping QB wasn't up to it and yack yack blah. Excuses rain down. My real reason for concern is that there seems to be a downward trend on defense, the one thing I previously thought was going to anchor this team forever. Part of this has to do with shifting conferences, and part of it has to do with the fact that we're so thin at DT, if we'd had a spring game, there would have been guys playing two ways. This is after last year's disastrous defensive showing at all levels. I have no hope--none, nadda, nil--that the defense is going to be any better this year than it was last year. And if anyone has a single good reason to think it might, be prepared to hear the name "Lavonte David" combined with "absent" a lot in my followup response. Pelini is a mediocrity at this point. 9 wins a year is great. I don't think he can sustain that very long with the kind of 'talent' he had in the secondary last year. I'm also utterly underwhelmed with his appointments at both coordinator spots. I see this as a crucial season for Pelini. Not that I think he'll be fired if he has another letdown year like last year, but fan perception is a funny thing. It can shift, and once it starts to shift, it just gets worse and worse.
