There are a few comments that I would like to make, this appears to be the best spot for them:
Saturday was the first home game I’ve missed since the beginning of the P era. The weather wasn’t the issue and there are few things that would have kept me from the ceremony dedicating the statue to Jazz, unfortunately I had a funeral to attend (and gave my first ever eulogy).
I DVR’d the game but did not get a chance to see it until late Sunday. Awesome effort, having known the result (and many of the details to the result) took away some suspense but it was still enjoyable. A side note here: I spent a good amount of time at the funeral home on Saturday sneaking away to catch a glimpse of the score on my cell phone. This brought back some fond memories as my uncle (who passed away at 93) and I got in trouble some 43 years ago when (at my house, he was 50, I was 11) we felt watching overtime of a playoff game (the then longest NFL game ever, Dolphins-Chiefs) was more important than sitting at the table for Christmas Dinner.
Onto the game, I now believe we can have a competent offensive line (I spent quite a bit of time wondering if we could fix this in any reasonable time frame) and I liked what I saw when the two freshman (Crozier & Rutherford) were in at guard (we played them together quite a bit). I also believe that Levi can become a competent Right Tackle (LT may be a bit beyond his reach) and Knappe is beginning to show some nice things. We may be twelve plus months away from being consistently solid but our line play will return!
I see a ton of young, quality players throughout the defense, at RB, TE and WR to go along with what should be (a couple of nice recruiting classes willing) a stockpiling of offensive linemen. I truly believe that the only question we have is can the staff develop a QB? If the answer here is yes we can be good, Equivalent to the top handful of G-5 football schools good (which should be somewhere between 15-25 nationally) in a couple of seasons. From there the sky is the limit.
There are a number of other things I would like to comment on but this will take some time so I will limit this to one of those comments: Why is it that even after a solid performance (where we handed a very strong team its first ever conference loss) some people feel the need to knock Whitmer (there was a thread filled with backhanded compliments, qualified statements of appreciation and a few out and out derisions)? No, he is not Joe Montana. He did however play a quality game and at a minimum does not warrant any criticism for this past Saturday.