Payton's eyes seem wide open

[blazers]

Potential to be the right guy? That could apply even to Doeren and Cutcliffe. Cutcliffe also has won a Coastal

What's your point? You said "The history of college football is filled with people able to capture lightning in a bottle once" , so I say you need to be really careful who you fire and hire. It is foolish to fire a winner and Fed has proven potential to be a winner here. Get past the sanctions and he could be a consistent winner.

 

[WoadBlue]

What's your point? You said "The history of college football is filled with people able to capture lightning in a bottle once" , so I say you need to be really careful who you fire and hire. It is foolish to fire a winner and Fed has proven potential to be a winner here. Get past the sanctions and he could be a consistent winner.

My point is that Fedora has already had his 1 season of catching lightening in a bottle at UNC. In 2015, we had an extremely favorable schedule: of our 14 foes, only 2 would finish the year ranked, and we lost to both. Our biggest OOC game was at a neutral site (Charlotte), and the foe would win only 3 games that year: one of them against us.

Our 11 wins were far from impressive. 2 were 1AA teams. Of the 9 versus D1/P5 schools, 4 had losing records, and one finished the regular season 6-6. Not a single one of them finished the year ranked.

The team had a large number of experienced Seniors and Juniors. And we were nearly injury-free all year.

Everything lined up perfectly in 2015.

The odds are not good that Fedora will be that lucky at UNC again.

 

[riverswe]

The 2015 schedule was favorable but unless something major changes our schedule every year is a little on the favorable side. We have Clemson or FSU sometimes but they are the only teams in the Atlantic that are consistently ranked. Now Miami seems to be getting good again but VT is the only other team in the Coastal that is consistently ranked (and they are generally in the 20s). Depending on OOC schedule, we might have one strong opponent each year but generally not even that. This is the major reason I think we should be aiming for 8+ wins every year and think that anything below 7 is a bad year.

I do think Larry can get the offense back on track - if he's willing to make a couple of changes. And hopefully we will commit a little more to defense which would go a long way in strengthening the team. For us it gets down to how we fare against teams like GT, Pitt, UVA, State, Duke and a team like Cal. All these are teams we should be able to beat most years. If we just win these 6 games (and the 2 against weak OOC opponents) we're at 8 wins. I know we won't win all 8 of these every year but we should be capable of winning one of the other 4 most years. And it would help a lot to win the bowl game.

So can Larry do it? I think he can if he truly evaluates what's working and what's not and makes changes to improve the team (and many times this is based on the guys on the team, not just the coaches). But he needs to make the evaluation and changes before the season starts and win game one.