RE: Lester
Lester did inherit high expectations, and should have. He owned them from the day he was hired, and said so. But to say that he didnt inherit "the 13-1 team" is wrong. every coach has to deal with lost players from the season before. But Lester still inherited a very talented and very experienced team. Folks complained that Fleck didnt play the backup QB much when he was here, and that left Lester with an inexperienced QB (despite the fact that Wassink was going into his third year of college football, all at WMU), but actually Lester did inherit Flacko, who had actually played downs of football when the games were still on the line, but Lester lost Flacko. Another point is that , until Wassink got hurt, how much football had our backups played? Its not like the new coaches have thought it is so critical to get backups throwing passes in games so they are ready when called on. I'm not advocating that he should be though. frankly, mop up duty handing the ball off at the end of games doesnt do much in terms of "seasoning" a guy to start the following season.
Lester inherited a team he and his staff should have done much more with last season. I said it many times before, last years team might have been the most talented team Lester will ever have at WMU, even if his recruiting continues at a high level. He was missing experience at receiver, and game experience at QB. But had such a load of great players in the other areas. And I still think the biggest mistake he made last year was putting those young players at QB and receiver in very poor position to be successful, by forcing them to make plays primarily on third and long, when defenses knew what to expect, rather than letting them play pitch and catch on downs when defenses expected us to run. But I digress....
This has been a very disappointing two years. We should have high expectations; and yeas, the fact that someone proved that WMU can have a team which dominates MAC play, and competes against ALL opponents, even those who others feel a MAC team should have no business competing against, does effect how die-hard Broncos assess expectations. I offer no apologies for believing we should be beating most MAC opponents like we beat CMU this year, and playing at least very close games, and winning our share, against the top MAC teams. We have the foundation to be consistently at the top level in our league; facilities, budget, fan base, and administrative support. We have been consistently getting solid recruits for six or seven years now.
Every now and then a program will have a game when everything goes wrong, and the galaxies put doom in the air, leading to a terrible beating which seemingly comes out of the blue. those games should happen maybe once every five or ten years, unless you are just a bad team/program. We have had four of those games this season alone, and not one of them can anyone blame on bad luck. if I was ranking the ten worst games in school history, where WMU played as bad, and I was most disappointed with the team and its coaching, four of them would be this year, and probably at least three of them would be in the top 5 worst games. This year we played only one game when I thought we looked "strong" against a D1 opponent. The rest of our wins were "acceptable", but certainly not "impressive". Dont get me wrong, any win is a good win, and style points dont need to be established, but on the other hand, we watch these games and can tell if the team is playing particularly well. We should have played better than we have over the last two years, and anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.
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Lester
