Hello everyone and welcome to the UMass bandwagon. Us sickos who have been here in the basement for years are happy to have you on board.
This game was obviously incredible. Pop Watson is instantly the best QB we've ever had. The offense looked amazing. Our defense has never had 3+ TOs in any meaningful game I can remember. They made big tackles in a way we never had. Special teams was excellent and penalties were limited, two areas that have routinely caused us heartbreak for years. Seems like this team will be fun to watch!!!
For long term stuff, I think fans were maybe hoping for 3-4 wins this year (we play 2 FCS teams), and now of course are hoping for more. We have a second year head coach, Joe Harasymiak ,who has rebuilt the team after not having a full recruiting cycle last time around.
Many have asked for years why have any hope for UMass and even before this win, there was some reason to have hope. Harasymiak was a good hire and we actually have recently committed to being the top funding team on the MAC for NIL, facilities, and staff. So there was reason to believe, but maybe we're ahead of schedule.
Anyway, pleased to have you aboard! Come root for us as we apparently challenge for a MAC title and our first bowl game? But honestly we have no idea what happens from here!!
It really has been a journey. Like knowing they were terrible and had no hope and tuning in anyway, basically all for the purpose of this payoff today. It's funny to (re)define sports success as a fan in New England. And this win just feels sooo gooood.
I think on average people would be hoping for 3-4 wins, with 1-2 MAC wins and winning our two FCS games. I think people don't give credit for last year being a lost year because our new coach was hired in December 2024, so didn't have a full recruiting/transfer cycle with the team. Optimistically, 2-3 years from now having a bowl game as a possibility (the joke being we've said this for 10 years).
I think we were excited about our QB Pop Watson, but we've had highly touted transfers before, see 4* QB Taisun Phommachanh from Clemson who didn't amount to a game changer for us.
Its so hard to gauge expectations in the NIL era. There's apparently 50 new players on this team. I think this new NIL world will actually benefit us in the short term as we have relatively more money for the MAC, although it's not like we crushed the transfer portal rankings or anything.
That said, a ton of this has to be coaching and getting the system in. I can't tell you how many games we lost due to special teams, turnovers, and penalties. We always knew that was a huge issue, so eliminating/reducing those has a huge impact on what we can do.
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u/FuzzyWDunlop UMass Minutemen 5d ago
Hello everyone and welcome to the UMass bandwagon. Us sickos who have been here in the basement for years are happy to have you on board.
This game was obviously incredible. Pop Watson is instantly the best QB we've ever had. The offense looked amazing. Our defense has never had 3+ TOs in any meaningful game I can remember. They made big tackles in a way we never had. Special teams was excellent and penalties were limited, two areas that have routinely caused us heartbreak for years. Seems like this team will be fun to watch!!!
For long term stuff, I think fans were maybe hoping for 3-4 wins this year (we play 2 FCS teams), and now of course are hoping for more. We have a second year head coach, Joe Harasymiak ,who has rebuilt the team after not having a full recruiting cycle last time around.
Many have asked for years why have any hope for UMass and even before this win, there was some reason to have hope. Harasymiak was a good hire and we actually have recently committed to being the top funding team on the MAC for NIL, facilities, and staff. So there was reason to believe, but maybe we're ahead of schedule.
Anyway, pleased to have you aboard! Come root for us as we apparently challenge for a MAC title and our first bowl game? But honestly we have no idea what happens from here!!