BearsTruth Board

[Latenightdrunkenrant]

I definitely lean towards this kind of confidence. My concerns are just that, concerns. But what it comes down to is a group of Baylor players of the like we've never seen before, at least not in the "modern" era, modern meaning post the life-draining, shoulder-crying, soul-dredging, vegan, soul- vulturing, failed abortion that Steele was. We're deeper and more talented on the offensive side of the ball than we ever could have dreamed of being five or six years ago.

Analogy time: Sure we lost Jimmie Johnson (RG3), but I feel like even Barry Switzer (Nick Florence) could be successful with the utterly ridiculous level of offensive talent we've accumulated without even a full year post Heisman/Stadium Announcement. If Nick was able to find even mild success when he was thrown into the fire in '08 as a True Frosh coming off a greyshirt, and then again when thrown selflessly into the Tech game last year, I have little doubt the guy will perform as a mature, married, graduated Senior with an entire offseason to prepare himself as the incumbent starter.

IMO, it all comes down to the improvement we see out of CPB's unit in year two. I remember watching the TCU game last year and thinking we were completely and totally screwed when our already thin secondary started dropping like flies. Honestly, I thought any hope of having a breakthrough season was over that night even though we pulled off the win. Going into this season, with the defensive standard being as low as it could possibly be, I have to remind myself that Coach Bennett was behind the Eight Ball from game one in Year One of a new system. We were terrible, but that was probably par for the course for what he had to work with.

But going into year two in the CPB era, not only are we the beneficiaries of a full offseason in his system, we also are far deeper on paper than we were going into last year. With the time/experience and depth/health combined, I think we can't help but be substantially better this year.

There is no way we'll be as good on offense as we were last year. Last year was an offense for the ages. But let's we manage to only drop off 20% which I think is reasonable. Then let's say our defense manages to improve 30%, and coming from the bottom of the barrel I think is entirely possible. That's a net 10% improvement, which should net us at least 1 win and me $1MM Internet Dollars.

The potential is there for us to have another amazing season. The awesome part is that our players genuinely believe they can compete with anyone on the planet and their not crazy for thinking so. We've rid ourselves of the old "internal improvement" mindset and our program has a genuine air of confidence around it, yet maintains a certain "scrubby little Baylor" chip on the shoulder. Regardless of how the '12 season turns out, I petty the Big 12 coaches who have to recruit and compete against Art Briles and Phil Bennett considering we're still a year out from competing will a full stable of Art Briles recruits, much less a full side of Big 12 caliber defensive personnel.

We are going to win the 2015 National Championship. [cheers]

[/Latenightdrunkenrant]