Welcome to the football side of things
@Minicoop69 were glad to have you!
There will be a ton of "preview" type posts from posters as the season creeps closer and closer but a brief overview for now:
Our defense should be top 2 in the conference (the other being Houston) this season. UConn jumped DRASTICALLY in year 2 of Diaco's defensive scheme in almost every statistic nationally. The one thing you will hear a lot of is that UConn's D is "bend don't break" which can drive you insane in certain games (see @BYU 2015 with us refusing to press their WR's) and be very effective in others (Houston). Obi Melifonwu and Jamar Summers are the 2 best players in the secondary, and probably 2 of the best in the country. Our LBer core is extremely strong with a lot of guys that have experience returning, plus the addition of EJ Levenberry who is a transfer LB from Florida State.
Offensively I believe this unit unfortunately is still a work in progress. With the style we play UConn will never be a 35-38ppg team but what we need to be able to do effectively this season is run the ball to move the chains and help bleed clock when we have leads. This falls on the O-Line as we have the RB's and QB to do this effectively. The OL has been UConn's achilles heel on offense for what seems like at least 5 years now. If the OL can come together then this unit should average 25-28ppg and take a TON of weight off of the defense, which carried the team and kept us in most games last season.
Special teams have to improve. We are probably relying on a freshman (Quayvon Skanes) to do a majority of our returns on both punts and kicks, although this position is technically still TBD. For as explosive as Newsome is out of the backfield, I don't know that he has the skill set to be a dynamic returner of kicks at the collegiate level.
Clock management issues will make you want to jump through a window with this staff. Regularly getting plays into the QB/huddle on time and not having to burn timeouts in 1st and 3rd quarters is an area I fully expect Diaco and co to improve on by this season. There were a couple of times last year we could've really used our timeouts later in halves but had to burn them earlier to avoid penalties.
Overall UConn seems to be on a really positive trajectory. The depth that is building here is something that we haven't seen here in a long time, and Diaco playing almost exclusively freshmen and sophomores in his first season seems to finally be paying off. This is one of the harder schedules we've had in a long time. We will definitely be underdogs in at least 3 (@ USF, @ Houston, Temple) and have tricky games @ ECU, @ Navy, @ BC, vs Cuse, vs UVA. This season sets up for us to win somewhere in the 5-8 range during the regular season, and I think that it would be fair to expect 8-10 in year 4 of Diaco for the 2017-18 season.
Last but not least, don't know whether you have them or not already but pick up season tickets. You can get them in the "young alumni" section with no proof of being a young alumnus required for around $112 TOTAL per seat for the season! There's tons of exciting games that will take place at the Rent this year and if you haven't been to the stadium in a while (or ever) I guarantee you you will like what you see. Scoop a pair of season tickets, take your son/brother/dad/friends and head to the Rent for a Saturday filled with beer, meat, and hard nosed Husky football!:
http://ev9.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncomm...linkID=uconn&shopperContext=&caller=&appCode=
