Since you seem to have a good grasp of what's going to happen based on personnel changes, how do you feel about MSU 2012?
If I'm reading your depth chart right, you lose Relf, Ballard, Carmon, Saulsberry, Lawrence, and Green just among offensive starters, assuming you don't have anyone else jump early to the pros. Outside of maybe Bumphis, I don't know that I see that from any juniors, and I think he stays. You also lose Maye, Mitchell, and Ferguson on defense. You lose Elliott, Bonner, Bure, and Wilson as other depth contributors.
Is it going to be plug the next one in and keep chugging along, or will you take a step back to rebuild for a year or two?
By the way, I don't know what to expect from our defense this year, but I'm pretty confident it won't be worse. Our problems last year were not just personnel issues. Being too slow and/or banged up was a part of it, but a big part of it was poor coaching and also poor conditioning. I expect the addition of Burns to help with the coaching side of things, and I believe we will be better conditioned as well. I'm not expecting world beaters on defense, but I think we can and will be better than embarassing. That's setting a low bar, but our defense last year never gave us a chance to win games. I expect our defense to at least give our offense a chance this year on occasion, which is better than what we did last year. LB is by far my biggest concern on the unit though. Losing Shackelford to an ACL and Jackson to a discipline issue turned a fairly solid group into a group that's going to need a freshman or two to step up to give us any depth.