I’ve said on here probably 1,000 times over the past 15 years that this place overacts to wins and overacts to losses more than I ever could have imagined possible. Hype going into every season is always way overboard, any single win increases expectations exponentially too much, and any single loss becomes a lightning rod of negativity like the world is ending. Most teams have some of that, but it’s really glaring here with the small market, lack of other focal points in the offseason, rising expectations, etc.
I do think it’s easy to forget we have a lot of youth, and it’s also easy to forget we just graduated many of our best football players in program history. That should have set expectations quite a bit lower this year than many wanted to admit, but some of us had accounted for. Dekkers had sky high expectations for what is basically his first real action. He showed glimpses last year and could develop into a great QB, but never should have had the pressure and hype this early. Likewise, too much hype was built up on our O-line and non-X receivers.
On the flip side, while our recruiting has never been better, it’s still struggling in many ways. You could make an argument that the level of success we’ve had over the past few years could have justified a bigger boost to recruiting than we’ve seen. That will continue to create talent and depth issues that keep our margin for error small. Hopefully, we continue to see that gradually improve.
I don’t know I could sit here and say anybody is wrong for picking ISU to win in a blowout or KSU to win in a blowout. The fact of the matter is that we’ve probably never known less about a team after 5 games than we do about ISU this year. There are obvious concerns and some bright spots as well. I don’t think it’s fair to say we can’t win another game this season or is it safe to assume that we will somehow become world beaters when we haven’t seen a lot of growth yet.
With that said, I do think the KSU game will tell us if we should expect much different through the back half of the schedule. Because we’ve seen a lot of the same struggles in both our wins and losses, it’s probably fair to say that a lot of the coachable and motivation factors should be corrected by now. If not, we probably know what to expect the remainder of the season. If we see progress, there is hope we could continue to be competitive here on out. Regardless, our Defense will keep us in many games.