To be elite or pretty good?
Answer is no
No matter what anyone tells u here don't listen. Don't look at the stars....the evals are bad most of the time and once u hit college stars get erased. The hype of recruit highlights here set unrealistic bars cause people don't know wtf they are looking at.
Donaldson was a freshman ALL AMERICAN.
He came in this year in the best shape of his life and he is a worse player than he was as a freshman and sophomore.
The majority of the team has regressed under Diaz. When guys are getting worse all over the field over time, talent isn’t the problem.
We have the talent to dominate the ACC this year. What we don’t have is the structure.
I don’t know if you have ever played championship football against fbs level players, but I have. As a sophomore we won a state title against the USA Today number 1 ranked team loaded with guys who signed with Miami, FSU, UF, Bama, G Tech etc.
We had the same talent level my junior and senior year but our coach left after we won State and the new guy wasn’t a real leader. We went 8-3 then 5-6 with first round playoff losses. People couldn’t figure out why we were underperforming, but it was ALL the head coach.
I know we ain’t 2000-2002 talented, but our guys are better than they have shown. When your head coach is a weak leader and doesn’t have the experience to manage a team, everything looks bad. The players look slow, weak, and undisciplined. It’s because they are not being developed properly emotionally. The EMOTIONAL development of a football team is the most important aspect to building a successful team. Even if you get scheme and technique right (which we have not), if you don’t AUTHENTICALLY develop the hearts and minds of your team, you will fail.
Think about every upset you have ever witnessed. The more talented team looks slow and weak. They tighten up and make mistakes either watching or guessing wrong. They weren’t emotionally prepared for the challenge that this team they overlooked would present. They don’t look like themselves. A bad football coach makes his team look like that frequently. Over time, Diaz’s team looks like that more and more frequently. Everybody looks stuck in the mud.
Even if we played well, no one knowledgeable would say we have elite talent. But we ABSOLUTELY have the pieces to be a GOOD football team that dominates the coastal and competes for the ACC. A competent head coach would have made us the team to beat in the ACC this year. It will take a miracle on par with the parting of the Red Sea for us to win the division.