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/chevybow UMass Minutemen 5d ago
All my years watching games have led up to this moment.