that roster was that year. Some of how bad the roster was falls on Weis, he could have mitigated one of those putrid classes some by coming to ND sooner, but where do you see 4 more wins?

Navy for sure, that was a bad Navy team that even Weis should have been capable of winning that year. I could see a better coach getting wins against Purdue and Air Force too, but after that I have a very difficult time seeing where the wins should have come from.

You'll get no disagreement whatsoever from me about 2009 though, good lowered that was an offensively talented team that should have had the type of year Oklahoma has had the last couple of years.

things that you should keep in mind:

1) Georgia Tech, Navy, Purdue, and AFA were all pretty mediocre that year, if I recall correctly. The fact that we completely shit our pants in those games doesn't all of a sudden make them great teams. I'm sure there are other games on the schedule that I can point out, but there's 4 for sure that you can see as winnable even with our "awful" roster (that had several future NFL players on it, including a center getting ready to play in the Super Bowl).

edit: Michigan State was pretty shitty that year too and Michigan was awful before we played them having lost to a 1AA team and Oregon and then we didn't even bother to get on the bus to play them.

2) It is one thing to lose and quite another to get completely undressed because you're unprepared and try to completely change offenses after one half of football and have a defensive coordinator in completely over his head. They made personnel choices in the pre-season that contributed to some of the blowout losses and our defensive scheme was completely unfit for a college team and we didn't have anything near the players needed to make it work and that should have been evident in spring practice.


Now, the last thing I will point out is that some of the choices (namely, more playing time for Clausen and a few other young guys) that cost us wins in 2007 likely led to better play in the following years and COULD have worked out had Weis been able to focus on other areas of the team besides the qb and offensive positions. What makes 2007 worse, IMO, is shitting the bed in 2009 with a talented and experienced team.

It's one thing to lose. It's another thing to suck. We lost a lot of games that year, largely because of Willingham's poor recruiting. We sucked that year, exclusively because of Weis' poor coaching.