1) I’ve always said that it is very tough to know how good or bad you are after one game.. Everything is based upon how good people expected you to be based on last season, returning starters etc. Notre Dame could be the best team in the country or they could be a 6-6 team- we don’t know. It appears that they are very good but we’ll see. Fans are always internally focused, i.e. because Mich upgraded at QB we should beat ND on the road at night in our opener, when in fact ND may well have improved just as much. Winbush certainly looks better than at any time last season. He made some big throws. The one TD our back-up safety was there and barely missed the ball- it’s a game of inches.
Some positives:
2) Patterson and in brief action, McCaffrey, looked better by far than our QB play last year. I guess Peters hurt his knee in practice this week.
3) Our defense after being shredded in the first half, gave up virtually nothing (less than 100 yards and 3 points) in the second half. Now some of that was probably Kelly going conservative with the lead. We played most of the game without Mettelus after the early targeting call.
4) An opening game on the road loss 24-17 to ND won’t kill us if ND is a 10 win or better team and we get better.
At this point it is all about the offensive line. With our schedule if they don’t get better we are probably looking at 7-5 or 8-4. If they do get better, 9-3 or even 10-2 is possible if the QB improvement is as good as it appears to be. MSU and PSU were not impressive at all. We at least will not be overrated for awhile now and its possible we will even be underrated.
The fan base will run around panicking and we’ll have to listen to some of them and Finebaum rip Harbaugh until we do win some big games. I have not lost faith.