I'm talking about teams with some talent here....obviously teams with a bunch of 2 star kids are going to lose a lot of games based on that alone.
I've pretty much always been of the attitude that a win is a win however you get it. It's just that even when we've scraped by inferior teams here and there in the past, I was at least watching a football team underachieve.
Kind of like Texas in the waning Mack Brown years, and then under Strong…..several sub-bowl eligible teams, and when I watched them, I felt like I was watching a team that was very bad at executing their plans. They couldn’t do their jobs well, so they lost a lot. If and when LSU ever dropped off the map, I thought it would look like that, which is how most bad teams look.
Last night I’m not sure what I was watching. This did not look like a bad football team exactly, rather it looked like a talented bunch of guys who weren't really playing football. I’m not gonna spend a bunch of time detailing everything that was worrisome, I’d have to TLDR the hell out of it. Rather I’ll just note the overall impression I had, which was that of watching a team that had no coaching staff. I don't mean that the staff did a horrible job in the way we think of bad jobs. What I’m saying is the team gave me the impression that those guys don’t exist. That is…..horrifying.
Like it was a bunch of guys who got together on their own and decided to schedule Syracuse to see how it goes. Like they had no overall goal, no plan, nobody calling the shots, just 11 guys on the field at various times running around to see what happens. Like a bunch of kids with zero adult supervision. There was never anything…I dunno…coherent. This wasn’t like watching a bad football team, which is usually bad execution or a horrible game plan or something. This was like watching guys who don’t know what they want to execute and had never heard of anything such as a gameplan. Like how a team that has no coaching staff would look, I imagine.
I don't really have a comparison, if you didn't watch it. The closest thing I can think of, I guess, is Orgeron's Ole Miss teams.
It is just one game, and it was a win, but I can’t shake this growing feeling that things are about to go off the rails. I hope I’m wrong. Right now I’m looking at the SEC schedule ahead and I’m struggling to find anything that feels like a probable W. I know UT and UF fans probably think they can lose to LSU, but unless you're watching us closely you may not understand what I'm talking about. Either of those teams would've torn us to shreds last night. Syracuse is not in the ballpark as talented as LSU, and they nearly beat us. MSU isn't either, although closer than 'Cuse, and they did tear us a new one. The games were similar. LSU is just athletically gifted kids who don't appear to know anything about the game of football.
I could be way off, but based on the last two weeks I'd say missing a bowl is as likely as making one. I hope this is wild overreaction, but I've never really seen anything like this, so I've got no reference point. This is not "bad" like UK, UT, or UF (offense) fans are used to talking about bad. This is utter disorganization at the molecular level. I've yet to see an SEC team playing worse football, though we might beat Mizzou, maybe Vandy, on sheer talent and fluke big plays, like we did Syracuse.
Previously, I said this felt like an 8-4 team with the schedule/youth/other factors, which could maybe go 10-2 if things trended up and got some lucky breaks. 8-4 feels like a windfall right now.