As I and others have said, you also have to look at what others have lost. It's not like RU is facing the exact same teams personnel wise they played last year. Maryland lost more on both sides of the ball. Michigan lost a large part of their offensive contributors and 3 or 4 of their top defenders. Nebraska lost a huge part of their offense. PSU lost a couple of guys from the D and still has OL issues. Gordon and Coleman are gone for Wisky and Indiana.
Other than OSU, every team is replacing a number of major contributors.
Correct. Every team, including RU, changes every season.
So I think it's reasonable for us to form some guesses about how our team will do as compared to ourselves in the prior season. In other words, we can consider just our team and say we're going to be better or worse overall or in specific areas.
For this season, I tend to think it's a good bet that we'll take a step backwards on offense, while taking a, hopefully, balancing step forward on defense.
What's less easily predictable is how well we will do vs. our competition this season, except in some extreme cases (e.g. OSU). Generally speaking, we don't know how well our new starters will perform yet. The same can be said of how well other team's new starters will perform. Prior performance isn't a guarantee of performance this season - players have breakthrough seasons, right?
A lot of times, I see our fans (I'm sure all fans do this) look at how well some of our new players look in the spring game or in moments from the prior season, and we think because they look so good to us, that we're going to be more competitive in the next season. But that's a myopic view. It's only half the necessary information to start forming a reasonable conclusion. Because we don't see how well the new starters are shaping up for the other teams, so we really don't know who will be more or less competitive. Yet.
The so-called experts form guesses based on available information (productivity of lost players, for instance), but we've all seen how often they're wrong. What the experts have going for them is that they aren't provincial or particularly biased - they look in depth at
all the teams, not just
their team.
Whereas most, but not all, fans are much more provincial - they may know a lot about their team and their players, but don't know a ton about the competition beyond what's reported in the media. And fans are usually pretty biased.
We'll get respect when we earn it. Unfortunately, our love for our team and it's players doesn't do much to earn us respect. We need to win big games consistently. And then we'll have earned respect. Until then, generally speaking, we're going to keep taking hits in the respect department.
Honestly, I think that's how it should be. It makes proving the "experts" that much more satisfying when it happens. We proved a lot of people wrong last year. If we keep that up, and build on it, we'll get respect.
