This is true. Good college teams sometimes play bad games. But I still expect an SEC champ loaded with talent to be able to handle the B12 runner-up in a year in which OU and UT are both too down to make the CCG.
TCU is good and has scoreboard on us, but let’s not make their squad this year out as world beaters in our backyard. They beat us, but only by one touchdown. The last 10-12 years have seen us lose a lot of games. They aren’t even the conference champs. You need a bit of luck to win it all, and they’ve had some. But they’re not champs of anything unless/ until they beat a Georgia team that is actually a conference champ, a defending national champ, undefeated, loaded with talent, etc.
The future is undiscovered country, I know. The more I see clips of Arch (and of others around him discussing him), the more convinced I am that he is the secret ingredient. I think he will be starting by 2024 at the latest. We will win some playoff games behind this guy.
He'll go star-shopping and plug the gaps on paper with a mix of bread and poison. There is enough talent on the team to win more games next year than he did this year. Rinse and repeat until the generally upward sloping BMD frustration index crosses the downward sloping cost of change function.
First of all, the title of the thread still has roaches at -13.5. I would certainly take UGA and those points. Seriously, though:
Ohio State is the only opponent to keep Georgia within single digits all year. There certainly exists a chance that Georgia will have an off game (cough, Kentucky, cough), but I rather doubt it. Georgia has blasted some decent teams already. Ceteris paribus, I think Georgia handles the frogroaches easily and covers with points left over.
If the conference were looking for the biggest FU they could manage, they would have us not play the RRS, instead having each of us play 5 road games to 4 home. Hopefully there is contractual language to prevent it. I agree that of all the "away" games, Houston would be best in terms of opportunity to play in front of a lot of friendlies.
I personally don't see why we don't money-whip every player over 2 stars at every position and sort them out later. We'll pay so much they will walk on to our rugby team and practice separately without taking up a scholarship until we need to use the "internal portal" to put them on the football roster. After what we've seen of this recruiting cycle, I'm not sure we can trust Sark to get and maintain us the talent we need, sadly. Spring portal deadline is coming within the next year, and we have not had any pressers alerting us to the buzzer-beater strategies he plans to use to get someone before it's too late.
OSU is going to be a big part of the crumbling of the big 12. Along with Baylor, they likely will fall the farthest. Small-town schools that have been semi-relevant nationally but appear unlikely to have enough success recruiting and retaining talent to matter much anymore. WVU went ahead and decided to fall into a toilet early.
Tech hasn't been worth national FB attention since they fired Leach. KSU hasn't since Snyder was in his first century of coaching them. Kansas had like one year under Mangino. ISU's version of success is when people remember that they are an actual DI school that once almost beat their more famous yet eternally mediocre "rival," Iowa.
The only current B12 school that will likely matter more than incidentally on the national stage after staying in the league is TCU. They are in a major metropolitan area, have a few alumni who can afford to help with some NIL, and are getting good exposure in the CFP a year before we dump this hole. Of course, getting exposed isn't always a good thing-- they'd better remember not to soil themselves against Michigan.
Nature is a collection of equilibria. Perturbations from an equilibrium can occur, but the restoring forces kick in and cause a return to the ground state. Aggy will never fall so far as to become a perennial 3-win team. They will never become a regular playoff team. They are doomed to ride the roller coaster forever. The guilty pleasure lies in knowing they will base their expectations off of their greatest upward deviations from their mean and in watching their chagrin when their expected glory inevitably fails to materialize.
They still have much of that talented 22 class. There is significant talent in their small 23 class. Their bmd guys are aggy and will come around enough to buy some second-tier filler in the spring. They only play 4 true road games. They will be talented enough to win 7-8 games next year, including one they shouldn’t. They won’t ever duplicate the ‘success’ of 22, but they will persistently bob back up to top 15 classes and play well enough to ruin a good team’s season every few years.
Balanced offensive skill class with at least one recruit at every single position:
Marginal top-300 QB - check (will be viewed by many as program's savior by mid-season 2023)
Flaky RB - check
TE - check
ATH - check
3-4? It only feels like 50 coaches and 100 years. I could not stand the “weather the storm” or whatever BS even when we were recruiting well. Coaches that downplay the RRS are categorically wrong when they do.