re: Take off your homer hat for a second

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1. we are horrible defensively against spread offenses

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Yeah. How many points did the National Championship spread offense with the Heisman Trophy winning spread offense QB put up on us last year?

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If you don't believe that MSU will be even better AND if you watched them as the year progressed, you know that we will have trouble with them at their house. So 1-3 is a real possibility unless we have a 180 on QB play.

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So we put up 29 points to MSU's 7 last year, but we need a "180" at QB because they've "progressed"? You realize they have to do more than 3 TDs of "progressing" before we have to improve a thing, right? And that's progress they'll have to make after losing 2 OL starters (including their All-American LT Derek Sherrod), their entire starting LB corps (including All-SEC MLB Chris White), and All-SEC DE Pernell McPhee.

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We lose more than them. We lost our top player at every level of the defense.

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Um, so did they: All Big East DL Chris Neild, All Big East LB J.T. Thomas, and All Big East S Robert Sands (on top of 2nd team All Big East DL Scooter Berry, 2nd team All Big East CB Brandon Hogan, and 2 other defensive starters). And if your argument is that we "lose more" simply because the players we lost were better than the players they lost, you have to remember that it's because the players we had were better than the players they had. And there's no reason to suspect that the situation would be any different with the replacements.

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They then hired, IMO, the best offensive coordinator in the country, and we hired someone solid. That is worth easily more than a 3 point advantage, but we’ll say for easy math it’s just a 3 point swing for them.

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"NOT SO FAST!", as Corso would say. A swing in their favor isn't justified based simply on comparing their current OC to our current OC. Rather, it would have to be based on how much they improved at OC compared to how much we improved at OC. If you think Holgo equals 3 more points of improvement over their last OC than Kragthorpe equals in improvement over Crowton, then that would justify a 3 point swing. But simply saying Holgo is better than Kragthorpe fails to account for how our OCs compared last year when we beat them anyway. I would not be surprised if many people thought that WVU's advantage at OC was MUCH more pronounced last year when we had Crowton calling the shots. And yet, we still managed to beat them.

Counselor, I bow to the well delivered, "slam dunk" statements of obvious truth(s) that you have asserted in your previous posts in this thread......

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I would not be surprised if many people thought that WVU's advantage at OC was MUCH more pronounced last year when we had Crowton calling the shots. And yet, we still managed to beat them

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You will not hear any WVU fans say this. At times we had 3 or 4 people calling plays and our OC's previous position was QB coach at Wake Forest. I think it's pretty fair to say both teams made big improvements in their offensive coaching staffs this off season. As for the outcome of the game I'm just predicting lots of drunkenness