We should NEVER be satisfied with a 4-8 year, however, that is exactly the record I predicted we'd have when the season started.
The question is.... is 4-8 good enough to keep the head coach around or not?
I'm almost to the point where I think for next year we need to let Wally and McKnight go and see what we can do with a new DC and a new weight training guy. We just don't have the financial ability to let everyone go and hire all new coaches IMO.
My biggest problem with this program I think right now is how we are physically getting manhandled on both sides of the line of scrimmage. You kind of expect that against OU, not to the extent we saw yesterday where they are gaining 10-15 yds before even being touched, but you do NOT expect to see us get physically manhandled by teams like UNI and NDSU. That is completely unacceptable at the Big 12 level.
So how does someone like McKnight justify our OL and DL getting pushed around by FCS teams?
And after yesterday, I'm just not sure how you can bring back Wally? Yes we didn't have the size or talent to compete with OU, but it was really disconcerting to see our guys so out of position, taking horrible angles, and not even tackling properly. That is on coaching.
But as someone else mentioned, we're playing Myers at DT when he's a DE, and guys like Knott and Brackens are the size of safeties not LBs. We do not have Big 12 size players at most positions. Just the idea that we're trying to turn Justin Madison, who was under 200 lbs a year ago, into a DE is the kind of thing that will always plague us IMO. He's up to like 220 lbs now or something, so he's still got about 30-40 lbs more to put on to compete at this level as a DE. But this is the kind of thing we always seem to try to do.
With the talent level and size of the guys we put out there every week, we just cannot compete in this league with anyone other than KU and possibly a couple other bottom dwellers of the Big 12. Sure, we can pull off an upset once every great while, but that's not enough to sustain anything.
With the talent level and size of guys we have, the window for wins every year will be between 2 and 6 IMO. I cannot see us winning more than 6 ever with the guys we currently have and playing in a league this good.
In my 40+ years as a Cyclone fan, I've yet to witness much success at all. Yes, a few good wins, and a very small handful of decent seasons, but that's it. I'm not sure what would make anyone think that all of the sudden ISU is going to turn around decades of bad to average football? We've tried different coaches, we've tried upgrading facilities, we have a state of the art weightroom and indoor practice facility, and so on, and so on.
At some point you just have to kind of face the fact that it might not ever happen here, don't you? We are the northern most school in the conference by far. The conference is mostly made up of teams in Texas and Oklahoma. How do we compete with that year in and year out? It's very tough.
