Looking ahead to 2015

Tequilla said:

We have a real issue as a fan base right now IMO ...

There's a lot of impatience in our fan base because we haven't won the conference since 2000 combined with the success of Oregon. To too many of our fan base, the success that Don James had is the gold standard and the expectation is that we're going to have years like 1990-1992 every year isn't necessarily a problem from having a high standard perspective but also a problem in the sense that we're not at that level right now and the expectations that we are means that we're not in a great position to meet them.

Almost every single person that I ran into here in Tucson said how great of a coach Petersen is, how lucky we are to have hm, and how surprised they are at our general impatience with him as it is very palpable. For as great as 92-12 for Petersen was as a sign when we hired him, it's now a massive problem for him as those that were conference title or bust are fucking going ape shit right now.

I'm a firm believer that there's never one play that wins or loses you a game. It's easy to point to one thing and say that that is what won or lost you the game. But it's never the case. There are normally close to 150 plays a game.

In many ways today, we played our best game of the season. In many other ways, we played one of our worst games of the season. It's a microcosm of what we're seeing this year in this transition. We make a number of winning plays. We still make a number of losing plays. We hear a lot about details. And the details killed us today. Some from the coaching staff. Some from the players.

I get the frustration. There's no doubt about that - it's there. If there wasn't, you wouldn't care.

But as a whole, Petersen's going to get time to get everything built his way. For those buying in, there's a lot of positives that we're seeing. But at the same time, there's also a lot of mistakes (including from the coaching staff - which BTW happens for almost every single team almost every single week). I know it's hard to be patient because we've had such a hard time for so long. But there's also a need to have patience while at the same time maintaining a level of expectations.

Not trying to play the moral victory card this year, but our losses this year have been by 7, 25, 14, 14, and 1 this year. We have our current limitations, but we're also not THAT far away. It's a frustrating year. But we can't continue taking steps backwards. Petersen is the guy that we need to be successful. Because honestly, if he isn't successful, we'll be hard pressed to ever find a guy to be successful again.