Take Weber’s team. Would they be ranked this year absent our beating them? Yes, and in the playoffs.
Things happen during a season, injuries and such. If you beat a team ranked at the time you played them, that counts. The committees have a different standard, for a different purpose.
Sorry if I imputed the savior thought to you.

But they were ranked when we played. You don’t go by rankings after you beat them, that tends to knock them out of the rankings.
In the 2010 decade we beat no ranked teams. And not for lack of opportunity.
I’m not arguing Maier wasn’t better than current crew, but he wouldn’t be a savior. A college quarterback needs more mobility than Maier., not to put up statistics but to beat top teams.

In three years he never won against a top 20 ranked opponent. At least we’ve done that this year.
If we’re looking into recent past rosters maybe we should take the other Jake from the 2017 team. He had a number of quality wins

The guy who had no quality wins in 2019?

I always thought Hunter would get another chance, I thought Hawkins was sending a message but it was more of a change..
I was surprised Hunter didn’t come back earlier but may be due to medical considerations. I recall Jaylin White had a injury falling and hitting his head, missed rest of season

More than that I think. We should be two touchdown underdog on a neutral field. Fortunately weather looks to be not miserable.

I noticed in replay that Ford played some.
So apparently we had all our offensive linemen, some no doubt dinged up.

5. I assume you mean as running backs. Basically we have single and zero running backs in the backfield. This is the way football has evolved, the theory is that having spread formations stretches the defense horizontally and allows more effective run plays as well as making it easier to get more receivers out for passes. Adding another formation with two backs implies having a whole series of plays out of that formation. So while some teams do it we haven’t chosen to.
6. It wouldn’t surprise me, Lamson had the left guard job and lost it to Ford in 2019 or earlier.
So he’s not our first choice to play there. Illustrates that we don’t have a lot of depth in productive offensive linemen that they had to move him from tackle. He’s played multiple positions on the line. Center is a different story, multi year starter at that position.
9. When TT is in, doing the wildcat, he is often alone in the backfield, often a receiver is passing through with the fly motion but there is no running back. There is no handoff to running back position player in wildcat plays. So how many plays does TT run that aren’t wildcat plays? This gets back to the question of what is meant by Marsh as the “magic package”. Does package refer to a set of plays? Or does package refer to personnel? Or does Marsh mean that TT is an instantiation of a package. I’m sure it’s been said many times, “ Trent Tompkins is the complete package”.

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Mostly it’s a question of talent. Did we beat the teams we were more talented than? With the exception of Idaho State we did. Did we beat any more talented teams? Yes, Tulsa, and Weber may have been more talented.
We finished again behind teams that finished ahead of us in 2019, with everyone playing a lot of returning players. except we squeezed in ahead of Weber.
Until we can win in the trenches our offense is going to look disjointed and limited.
This was a transitional year at QB, and they were inconsistent, unsurprisingly.

Wow , we play these guys in second game next season.

I don’t necessarily agree the coaching staff was “inconsistent” or “vacillating” with the quarterbacks.
Rodrigues had the bulk of the snaps until he had a concussion. From the outside we don’t know the full situation from a medical point of view, or whether they would have made the change to Hastings absent the medical question; once they went to Hastings they stuck with him.
I don’t think Tompkins was ever viewed as a contender to be an every down quarterback, and I don’t think using him was a negative.
They certainly didn’t vacillate between quarterbacks like Sac does, apparently as an art form. Maybe they should have.

Biggest disappointment with the offense is the inability to block run plays, as seen on Gilliam's no gain runs, or when the defender in the backfield simultaneous to Hutton about to get the exchange from Tompkins. It must be a challenge for the offensive coordinator when you can’t throw deep or block running plays. Guess he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Understandable that they started slow because of their long layoff.

The defense was pathetic until the game was decided. Good defense in garbage time.

Haven’t stopped a drive without points yet.

I’m not critical of either the coaches nor Rodrigues for his taking chances, it was a big game and he played his heart out. But he can’t play like he’s Tompkins or Borisch or O’Hara, he’s too slight.

if coaches don’t see an injury on the horizon when you have a 6’ 170lb quarterback running it shows a lack of imagination

I think Sacs getting better results from two quarterbacks than either would give them alone. Dunniway is second in the conference in passing efficiency.
What makes the QB position one in which you’re not supposed to platoon? By having two guys with different skill sets, you increase the challenge the defense faces and you’re that much more resilient to injury. I like the way sac changes quarterbacks within a possession, gives them opportunities to talk things over with the QB, and match each guys skills to the situation. Whichever guy they have out there is probably the worst one for us.

If they had a position called “running QB” who would be all conference, Borisch or Tompkins? Disregard all passing stats.

So far TT has not shown he can get the ball to anyone beyond the line of scrimmage consistently enough to be an every down quarterback. I guess but don’t know that is true in practice as well. He’s still best used as a quarterback because otherwise he pretty much duplicates Larison at running back or receiver.
I think next season we’re going to see open competition for the quarterback job, maybe with new names.
But the QB position isn’t our only area on offense where we aren’t as good as the competition when we’re playing the top teams in our conference. I think our offensive line is an area that needs improvement, and where we don’t have underclassmen ready to take over.
It’s an old story so we overlook it but in big games we get physically beat. Always have through the years, and we expect the QB to compensate for that. It never quite works out.

The time Marsh and Dunning raised the issue was our first drive which ended in a touchdown pass to Harrell.
The next drive in the red zone Tompkins was used for the entire drive, included his long run, settled for a field goal from the 12.
So no missed opportunity