(01-03-2020 09:39 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  I will eat some crow, here.
My expectations were for at least 4 wins. Going 0-9 at the start was very disturbing.
But, with hindsight, absolute kudos to the coaches and to the team for going 3 straight wins to finish the season out.
A friend of mine, whom coached d1 baseball and with whom I discuss Rice athletics, noted that it would have been very easy for a 0-9 club to go 0-3 or 1-2 in the last stretch. Fundamentally very difficult to close out with three wins, *especially* after the atrocious 0-9 start.
So, I have to give kudos to the 3-0 finish; and have to give the coaches the kudos for actually keeping the team 'in it' to do so, especially after the horrific oh-fer 9 to start out with.
Still not really happy, because of what is an essentially a 'no change' season with one more win than last year.
If the 3 wins had been interspersed over the season it would have been a D rating for me. But the accomplishment of the last 3 game sweep with that finish raises the grade for me from that D to a C-.

Like you, 4 wins was kind of the midpoint of my expectations. I figured we'd go 0-for-nonconference, and then go 4-4 in CUSA. 3 wins was kind of the minimum acceptable outcome, and I had no real upper boundary on expectations. Frankly, I don't really see haw a team that improved as mochas we did on defense and had solid special teams could do worse that 6-7 wins in CUSA, and I still find it somewhat hard to believe just how bad our offense was.

At this point, I'm looking at 2020 and expecting 7 wins, with 6 kind of my minimum. I figure we beat Lamar and then go 6-2 in conference. One win less and I'm disappointed but okay, 5-7 or worse and I'm not a happy camper.

I have to say that the Bloomgren era so far is challenging some of my long-held ideas about football. I have felt that if you were solid on defense and in the kicking game, you'd win at least half your games, particularly in a league like CUSA where nobody else plays defense. I guess I always assumed least mediocrity on offense, and for at least 9 nine games, we were well short of that. And the defense was greatly improved but probably still no better than middling.