flyfishwyo said:OrediggerPoke said:Old-Bull said:LanderPoke said:The talent in say 2016 was not good enough to win the league? Come on. We were a couple plays away from winning the league. IMO the talent is good enough to make a run at the league each year. Coaching has let us down.307bball said:Old-Bull said:The other thing that should be abundantly clear after not winning the league in 25 years, is that were not recruiting good enough athletes to win the league.
This is the fly in the ointment!...players win games....if you don't get the top guys or build the top guys you will not win...period..I don't care who is coaching.
We gave up 70 points to UNLV in 2016 and lost to Eastern Michigan on the road. We definitely had talent on the offensive side of the ball, but the defense wasn't all that great.
That 2016 defense had these guys: Cash Maluia; Logan Wilson; Marcus Epps; Rico Gafford; Carl Granderson; Tyler Hall; Andrew Wingard; Lucas Wacha; Eric Nzeocha. All of those guys have been on NFL rosters at one point. This is a terrible collection of talent on defense at Wyoming?
101st ranked defense in the country. They had a bunch of injuries up front. Gave up an average of 34 points a game. Wilson, Hall, and Maluia were freshmen, Wingard and Epps were sophomores, Gafford was in his first year at UW. Granderson only played 6 games, Nzeocha played 2, Appleby played 8. They weren't a good defense.
That 2016 team was definitely talented by Wyoming standards...the offense was even talented by MWC standards. The defense was not....The guys names that were listed were not contributing heavily ... or were being leaned on before they were ready.
I'll take talent over coaching every time...it has such an outsized impact. Wyoming's results this century are much more a reflection of the talent level of the guys on the field ... but that is true for almost every college football team. Give me a team like Alabama...with better players then their opponent at every position and I'll take whatever terrible coach....I'll beat teams at Wyoming's level until the cow's come home in that situation.
The good news is that it doesn't take that much talent to rise in the MWC...just a slight uptick will result in years like 2016.