Football season is setting up great this year

[Railin Jemmye]

I hear ya. I think your scenario is more likely than 5-7 like the doomsayers are predicting.

 

[121Josey]

^^^^ THIS ^^^^^

Is the reward for beating them worth the risk for losing to them?

And the answer is no. But there's nothing that we can do about it now.

The exposure is nice, but the exposure does nothing for us that early in the season. If we win, then OSU will be drug through the mud and emasculated. But if we lose, it creates a negative mentality, a hole that will tough to crawl out of.

Please remember that we hardly ever play well away from DWS. I've watched too much under-performing the past two years to expect anything except a good (one) half of football during a shootout.

On a positive note, the OSU game excites me because I HATE opening with usual three straight cake-walks. Hopefully we'll figure out our flaws before AU does.

Coach34, there's no way to sugar-coat our schedule. Anytime you have two games (SEC and homecoming) between your open dates, it's a recipe for failure. We could have played Kentucky the week before, but the SEC gave us the shaft. And they took away one of our Saturdays, with another moving to Houston.

 

[johnson86-1]

Maybe, Mabye Not.

I just thought we were past where we were in 2011, we're not?

But we should be significantly better in 2014 than we were in 2011, and that's when I'd prefer to try a game like this. I feel like we have a good chance to win the game, but not if we look anything like we did at the end of this year. We need our new DC to not handicap us, which means he has to get young DL to step up and be much better than last year and we need basically a brand new secondary to not take us out of the game. We also need our offense to be better while losing our best run blocker from 2012 and our only playmaker at receiver.

Considering we will still likely have several middle of the road teams (UM, Aub, Ark, LSU?) to get solid wins against, and plenty of tough competition that will be in the top 15 (A&M, Bama, South Carolina, LSU?), I'd rather take the the wins OOC. Being bowl ineligible looks a lot worse than it used to with the 12 game schedule, and even a crappy bowl game (a) is a bowl game and (b) comes with extra practices.