I'm seeing more and more articles saying Sherman saw significant progress in the loss to Tech, specifically in effort and 'buy-in' from players. The flip side to this, what is somewhat worrisome, is that some people apparently weren't totally buying in to what the coaches were teaching prior to this past week. If this is true, that is disconcerting.

While I know you are going to have some people who are opposed to change, and have difficulty making the transition to a new coaching staff, I would hope they would give the new staff a chance. I guess I was a little too optimistic that the players would realize that Fran wasn't getting them anywhere, and any coach was better than having him return.

There is also the issue of having a staff made up of a majority of former NFL coaches, many of whom have no previous experience in college coaching. Apparently one of the biggest adjustment for Sherman & Co. has been adjusting to the 20 hour a week limit on practice/meeting time, which limited how much they could teach the players. I think they may have tried to install too much too early, especially on offense, and it hurt us in the early going. From looking at statistics, our players have absorbed the offense as we have steadily improved as the season has progressed. Defense appears to be improving slowly, but progress is not seen in stats, it has to be judged on a play-by-play and series-by-series basis.

The usage of true freshmen on offense and defense has helped improve team speed, but more importantly, it has helped improve buy-in for the plan Sherman & Co. have for rebuilding our team.

Now if we can just integrate Jorvorskie Lane into the offense more as a ballcarrier, I think we'll really become a threat the rest of the season. We need to be using all of our weapons on offense, and Lane is one of them. We have a backfield rotation of Bradley Stephens, Keondra Smith, Cyrus Gray, and Mike Goodson. This gives us five backs to carry the load, and we will need all of them as we move into the second half of our season.