Before the season if you would have told me that ISU would have developed a decent running game and protected the QB enough to only allow 2 sacks in the first two games, I would think we would have two wins. So far that is major improvement from last year. So I don't think we are simply a bad team with no hope this year. You can tell these guys have not gelled into a "team". My expectations for this year was not an X amount of wins but improvement in what we couldn't do last year and improvement during the year. With that said, can we please win some freakin ball games?
This is very, very accurate. While they wouldn't have been firm wins, we likely would be 2-0 if we could just hold onto the football (dropped punts, interceptions, bad snaps) and decrease the number of silly, untimely penalties.
So yes, if those things were corrected, which are
very correctable, we could be an ok football team this year.
Having said that, we still fall like a house of cards following any sort of mistake. Those things kill you just as much, if not more, than the mistake itself.
Part of that is general adversity handling - mental toughness and the will-power/confidence to leap over those road blocks.
The other part is, while I think we're better defensively, our defense is still not to the point where we can expect them to make plays for us, especially following turnovers or a rash of 3-and-outs.
In 2004 and especially in 2005 - our defense did that for us. We were not world beaters, but had some success those years.
We're saw what happened in 2006 with a sub-par defense and we're seeing what happens with it so far this year.
Defense can win you football games, even when the offense isn't helping the team. We're not there yet on defense.
