Arnaud vs. Stanzi

[Al_4_State]

In all seriousness though, you root for some awful teams. How did you come up with your affiliations?

Certainly not by cheering for teams he has a legitimate reason to cheer, like say attending that school or something crazy like that...

 

[jdoggivjc]

The 2002 team was one of my favorites ever and gave us a wildly entertaining season, but were they really that talented or did Seneca Wallace make them competitive. With Seneca, they competed with everybody. When Seneca was injured, they got blown away (Oklahoma & Boise State). My non-thorough review of the 2002 roster shows three starters other than Seneca who made the NFL, namely Jordan Carstens (nice couple years), Zack Butler (cup of coffee) and Jeremy Lloyd (cup of coffee). I'm of the opinion that Seneca had the intangibles to make those around him much better and almost single-handedly willed us to victory (see the FSU screw-job game).

I'll concede that Seneca had better surrounding talent in 2002 than AA had in 2008, but I still think Wallace is the best pertinent example of "having the intangibles" and I don't think AA has demonstrated that he has "it" yet. He appears to have the physical tools; let's see him finish the job and beat some "superior teams" over the next couple years. It is pertinent to the argument at hand...

Here's the problem, though - what are you comparing the talent to? How much talent do you think has actually run through here? If I had to make a guess, the only two teams that compete with the talent level of the 2002 team in recent memory would be the 2000 team and the underperforming 2005 team. With the exception of Troy Davis you can pretty much forget any team before 2000. 2001 was a less talented version of 2002, 2003 was a disaster, 2004 was a less talented version of 2005, 2006 was a failure version of 2005, and 2007 and 2008 don't even compete with 2002. So basically it comes down to 2000, 2002, and 2005. Of those three teams, I'd say that 2002 is likely the most talented.