re: 2018 Recruiting Thread: Sprint to NSD.

it is stacked, but no one back there can do what toney could. he's easily the best 3rd down back on the roster.

i'm excited about mullens, but anything less than 9-3 would be a failure. we start off the season easy, so should be plenty of time to grow before real competion starts.

Expectations for 2018 should be set LOW.

Talent wise we are ok, but we'll have an entire team learning new systems. Expect mental errors

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I think we can go 8-4 with a bowl win, and anything better than that would be a pleasant surprise.

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who are we playing next year?

uga, lsu and maybe fsu are the only schools we have any business losing against. fsu because of talent only. i think we go 10-2 with losses to uga and lsu. that's not unrealistic. the absolute floor, and a bad season would be 8-4 before bowl games.

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I mean, we were a 5-7 team last year

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With a real quarterback playing we beat LSU and A&M pretty solidly without key players all over the field on offense and defense.

With a real quarterback we probably beat South Carolina pretty easily, too. Our defense had three turnovers, we did pretty well.

With a real quarterback, frick, if we just ran the goddamn ball against FSU the entire game, we beat them by a score at a minimum.

All of those games were dominated by underclassmen in the back 7, who are maturing and growing up still but they've been playing all year.

Last years team had its HC with one foot out the door, but if you look at the stats -- they're pretty impressive and honestly, we could have easily been a 9 win team (including Northern Colorado).

I have no doubt that whatever QB we have next year, they will look much better than the product we had on the field this year.

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it is stacked, but no one back there can do what toney could. he's easily the best 3rd down back on the roster.

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I'd love to see Toney and Davis line up as split backs -- that'd be terrifying for any defense because you have got to put at least two people on either one of them. The problem is that:

We have 5 RBs, two of them look fricking amazing/scrappy (Lemmons/Davis), one is Perine, the other is Pierce and I think we have an APB or ATH coming in as RB. Toney would be fifth or sixth string, because he's not big enough to run the offense Mullen wants.

At WR -- he's still not a true WR, one of his biggest problems is route running. We're going to have Cleveland, Van Jefferson (if he plays), Grimes (if he plays) and potentially Swain or Hammond, or both of them, then there's Massey who is basically a bigger, stronger but slower version of Toney.

I really do think he could benefit with a RS and have him practice route running/being an actual WR.

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S. Carolina (regardless of what Straw thinks) is not a pushover.

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Eh, they beat us by one possession at home after three turnovers with both offensive and both defensive captains sidelined.

We return almost the entire defense outside of Bryan, and the entire offense except at this point we have a guy who actually likes offense -- who likes to playcall.

Mullen doesn't give a frick how he moves the ball, and that's the biggest difference.

In the end: If we can be only one score down on the road without:

Our best DE.
Both starting safeties.
No backups at Linebacker.
#1, #2, #3 receivers
#1, #2 Quarterbacks (Franks is easily #3)
#1, #2 Running Backs

I don't think it's farfetched to say:

We will have a better QB.
We have a MUCH better staff.
We will have a better playcaller.
We will have more depth on Defense.
We will have more depth at every offensive position.
We are home for the SC game.

I mean, it's not crazy to be optimistic about beating them at home when SC had to basically have us derp the game away with one of the worst teams we've had in a long time.

The Browns have secured the 1st overall pick in the draft. Kids across America are staying in school.