2008 revisionism

by Jay, San Diego, Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:19 (6243 days ago)
edited by Jay, Sunday, March 01, 2009, 13:12

I've seen a few people now declare that 2008 was a story of "halves", with UNC being the dividing line.

When I look at the 2008 season I see nothing so clean cut.

Here's a response I put up on NDN to one such post. Any thoughts?

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2008 is not neatly divided into "good, then bad," and UNC did not crack the code. There was no neat and easy demarcation line to the season, with good performances beforehand and poor performances thereafter. I think the better explanation -- albeit messier -- is that we were maddeningly inconsistent from the beginning, and throughout the season.

Our offense sputtered against SDSU, UM, MSU, BC, Syracuse, and USC. It rocked and rolled against PU, Stanford, UNC (yep, UNC), Washington, and Hawaii. It was dead average against Pitt and Navy. The truth is our offensive output was all over the map all season long. Individual game outcomes defy a simplified explanation that the teams later in the season "figured out the template."

P.S. There's some serious revisionism going around about the UNC game. North Carolina did not "shut us down." Yes, they did jump our TE routes effectively and took one to the house to open the half. But we put up 497 yards of offense in that game, on just 10 drives. We gained 64% of our available yards, which was the third-highest percentage all season (better than our performance against Hawaii, even). We lost the game because we turned the ball over (3 fumbles, two interceptions, once on downs); specfically, we turned it over 3 times in the fourth quarter alone. This is the not the same way that BC or USC beat us, who completely shut us down in a way UNC didn't.