But I would contend that the vast majority wouldn't have classified this as a "rebuild" project 18 months ago. We were solid but not spectacular with the coaches being the weakest part. Better coaching was expected to reduce/eliminate the embarrasing losses and push us to the next level - winning a conference title. Better coaching combined with better recruiting would get us back in the national title hunt.
Not in one season.
Nobody expected 5-7, but I don't think many of us expected to win a conference title in year one either. If you've got a decent house built on a cracked foundation, when you start working on the foundation the house doesn't get immediately better.
I didn't say we would see a conference championship in season one. I said new coaches were expected to push us to the next level, not start all over.
I thought 10 wins last year was pretty realistic given our schedule but I thought we'd lose an extra one due to QB play. If we beat four out of five of BYU, Illinois, Wisconsin, Northwestern and Purdue - all teams we easily could have beaten - that would have been 9 wins with Iowa being the extra game we dropped due to poor QB play. So I think it would have been pretty easy to get the same W-L results we had been getting in season one and then improve from there. Even an 8 win season would have been understandable given all the changes.
But 6-7 really can't be seen any other way that significantly under-achieving.
Agreed entirely with your last sentence. New coaches were expected to push us to the level, and they still are. However, "push us to the next level" and "start all over" are not mutually exclusive statements. There is no dichotomy here.
Again, that's the semantics of the whole argument. I agree that they aren't mutually exclusive. But I think most would have said we only needed the former, not the latter.
Anyone with more than 2 or 3 working brain cells knew these coaches were going to install a completely different system on at least the offensive side of the ball and that almost always includes a learning curve, aka, a transition period. Sadly, most fans just want to sit there chugging Budweiser and slamming chicken wings while they b!^@h about the teams misfortunes.
Fortunately I could use my 3 working brain cells to look at other schools that had new coaches last year.
School - 2014 record - 2015 record
Schools that got 2+ more wins
Houston - 8-5 - 13-1
Michigan - 5-7 - 10-3
Tulsa - 2-10 - 6-7
Florida - 7-5 - 10-4
Pittsburgh - 6-7 - 8-5
Schools that stayed the same (+/- 1 win)
Troy - 3-9 - 4-8
UNLV - 2-11 - 3-9
SMU - 1-11 - 2-10
Central Michigan - 7-6 - 7-6
Buffalo - 5-6 - 5-7
Wisconsin - 11-3 - 10-3
Schools won 2+ fewer games
Colorado State - 10-3 - 7-6
Kansas - 3-9 - 0-12
Nebraska - 9-4 - 6-7
Oregon State - 5-7 - 2-10
So five schools got better in their "transition year", five were basically the same and four got worse. Out of the schools that got worse, Colorado State didn't fire their coach, he got a huge promotion. You may know some of the coaches that left Oregon State. And Nebraska tied for the worst change in record of all of those schools.
So - as I've said for quite awhile - there is definitely going to be some transition, but that doesn't mean that things have to get worse. In fact, judging by that list, it's actually more likely that things get better.
And that's before you take into account that our schedule included two schools (Wisconsin and Illinois) who were also in a transition year one school (Miami) that was in such good shape that they fired their coach later that year. We lost to all of them.
But I've got to take a break now. All that research and that last Budweiser might have me down to 2 brain cells now.
