Honestly - the optimism lies in the reality that Al never wanted to admit to. Gavin just wasn’t a good every down QB no matter how much time the OL gave him. The receiving unit wasn’t great either but it was more than that. He couldn’t complete simple passes despite having ample time the vast majority of the time.
We had to give Gavin an extremely long leash for important reasons connected to the culture of the program. Greg handled the situation well dispite your banter and the strategic decisions to turn to Gavin to stack up a collection one yard touchdowns to pad positive stats to boost his confidence and overall morale made sense too (but yes - Kyle could’ve converted those easily).
But the truth is - it isn’t going to take much to improve the passing game. We’ve upgraded our receivers and the passing accuracy could not be worse. We’re going to be better on offense barring injuries. We have to.
Having said all this - there is a ton of talk about how easy our schedule is, and little talk about how many games on the schedule are actually going to be easier than most of the games we won last year. Think about our best wins last year and the favorable circumstances surrounding them - NW at home following a scandal, VTech at home amidst a QB change and them battling a collection of injuries, and a Miami team playing mostly with second team players. To win 8 games, we’re going to have to win 2-3 much harder games than we won last year. So yeah - our team will be way better but that still doesn’t guarantee a clear path to 8-4.
