That's ludicrous. So if someone evaluates a team and a schedule and says, that's a 7 to 9 win team, then we should be mad when we dont win 10 to 12 games? That's retarded. You'd have a point if it was just people here saying we should win 5 -7 games, so that they can be like "look how good we are, we exceeded expectations" ... that's not the case. Professionals who are completely unbiased, as in they don't care about us, golden etc... said based on our talent and schedule ( with a sr. Qb) that a good season for this team, this year, would fall betweem 7 and 9 wins. That's not just some number "goldenites" made up for the sake of "meeting expectations".
It's not retarded, it makes perfect sense. Let's start from the beginning and explain expectations in general (not UM related).
Stay with me please:
A. Quick Review
Expectation: a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.
How do we decide expectations? Trend Analysis.
Trend Analysis: the practice of collecting information and attempting to spot a pattern, or trend, in the information.
So the way people make expectations is to study the information in the past in order to forecast the future.
B. Expectations and Trend Analysis in predicting futures (i.e. over/under wins)
What "experts" do is they study the past (of a team) and attempt to forecast the amount of wins? They will look at MOSTLY the coach and the team and see how they performed in the recent past in order to set the bar for the future.
Now when a team has done poorly in the past and little has changed, the "experts" will predict similar results in the future. This is how it works.
-------------------------------------------- (BACK TO UM)
C. 7-9 Wins versus 10-12 Wins
The reason experts predict 7-9 wins is based on the following:
1. 13-11 in the ACC (over 3 seasons),
2. 0 Coastal Championships,
3. 0-3 Against FSU, and
4. 1 Win versus a team that finished with 8 or more wins (GT 2011)
For the last 3 years we averaged 3.6 Ls in the ACC. Our best win (in terms of a final record stand point) was in 2011 against GT. They had 8 wins. Together this shows experts that we have trouble beating the humps in our conference. In addition, we have trouble beating teams that are decent. The ACC schedule doesn't change that much from year to year.
Now even if we get 7-9 wins, this isn't an accomplishment. It means NOTHING. It means that we've likely repeated a similar result. The reason we will keep repeating this result is because this staff can only take us so far. Simply hitting these expectations MEANS NOTHING because they're based on our trends in the past.
So you and all the Pro-Golden guys can be proud that we matched these expectations. That is better than winning the Conference, Beating FSU, Going to BCS Games, Winning 10+ Wins and NCs. That is all that matters is meeting LOW expectations. How about a shred of accountability and standards?
