And it is still in our reach. Any trip to San Antonio is a fun one and a successful season. Let's not get bummed out just yet. If Dana pulls this off, no way he gets fired.
On the other hand, one more loss against the very mediocre teams left on our schedule and Dana deserves to go.
My question is for the 7-5 crowd with no banner victories. Do you think we need to stick with Dana another year knowing that we're graduating 10 starters off of this year's team and the defense won't be nearly as good? I don't see any way a Dana coached team wins 8 games next year.
If 9-4 plus an Alamo Bowl win were Holgorsen's average performance, I'd be the happiest guy on this board and talking extension.
That said, it would take a monumental fade by one of the top 4 teams in the conference for us to get Alamo this year. As the second bowl in the Big 12's pecking order, I don't see them passing on one of the big guns unless somebody unexpectedly loses 3 of the last 4 or something like that from here and we also win out.
As for your question about 7-5 with no banner victories, I think so. Even as somebody who has wanted Holgorsen gone for awhile, to me that performance would be enough to retain him for 2016. An underrated part of being good that is overlooked by most all fans and analysts is taking care of business against the bad opponents.
A valid criticism of the Holgorsen era so far is that we hadn't done that very well. Each previous season had seen a top 15 upset, but also at least one equally head-scratching loss...often to a team with a losing record. Since many of us were justifiably asking for him to get better against the mediocre portion of the schedules moving forward, I don't feel you could fairly dismiss the guy for having finally done so simply because he didn't also pull off a ranked upset as well.
Even if you do think next year's outlook is grim (and I might even agree on that), I still believe meeting an important tangible goal we wanted DH to achieve in 2015 would be enough to earn him the opportunity to prove us wrong about 2016.