Warning, TL;DR post to follow. The short version: For those who are extremely and relentlessly down and/or angry about Tech football, the questions is: Based on history and current circumstances with both Tech football and what we can observe from college football as a whole, what is your mindset and how do you set and manage expectations? This board is so off the rails sometimes I can't wrap my head around how people seem to be genuinely and intensely angry when we lay an egg... for the 15th year in a row.
Just like every year for as long as I can remember it seems most of the board spends the offseason drinking heavy doses of kool aid and convincing themselves this is gonna be our year. Then, when we inevitably look like crap (whether it be week 1 or week 6) There's a flood of "Player X sucks, bench him!" and "coach X sucks, fire him!" and if we suck enough times, the inevitable "Fire Kirby." There was a time when I could understand this stuff because I was a student during the prime Leach years and that's all I ever really knew of Tech football, so my expectations were that we should always be 7-5 at a bare minimum with plenty of national attention, big wins, the occasional chance to be competing for the CCG in November, etc. However, none of that has been the case since at least 2012 or so if we're being generous and really since 2009. That's 15 years ago. Outside of a handful of blue blood programs, that's how football goes for literally every program in the country. You have some good years, you have smoe bad years and you have a lot of in between.
I know we hear about facilities, recruits, transfers, spring and fall practice standouts, NIL deals, donor support, etc and it's all good news and sunshine, but it also basically never means anything for the season at hand. At best that's an indication for whether you can feel safe hoping for the future, and even that requires several years in a row of everything pointing up if we're expecting to crawl out of the hole we lived in. None of which has happened since 2009. Yet we have people wanting players benched and coaches fired after one single game. People calling the season a dissappointment after one single game.
And to the one single game point, you can go back through every season of college football and find at least one 9+ win team who laid an early season egg, if not 2-3 throughout the year... but they still somehow got to 9+ wins, which I think everyone here would be throwing a party over if we could manage that. Yet the perspective seems to be lost on a lot of folks. I get it in game threads or even for the few hours afterward, but there's stuff even on Wednesdays and Thursdays that's so nonsensical and emotionally driven that I can't quite wrap my head around it.
So for those of you who are extremely down or upset, what gives? Is it irrational fanaticism? Do you just expect we will suddenly be Bama/Georgia out of nowhere? Is it simply cathartic to spew BS on a message board where there are no real consequences? Do you enjoy trolling? Do you have a similar attitude/approach toward life in general? I'm legitimately curious because I can't figure out how someone could watch Tech football for the past 15 years (or more), know anything about 90% of the other teams in college football, and still set expectations so high and put so much emotional well being on the line for something like this.
Just like every year for as long as I can remember it seems most of the board spends the offseason drinking heavy doses of kool aid and convincing themselves this is gonna be our year. Then, when we inevitably look like crap (whether it be week 1 or week 6) There's a flood of "Player X sucks, bench him!" and "coach X sucks, fire him!" and if we suck enough times, the inevitable "Fire Kirby." There was a time when I could understand this stuff because I was a student during the prime Leach years and that's all I ever really knew of Tech football, so my expectations were that we should always be 7-5 at a bare minimum with plenty of national attention, big wins, the occasional chance to be competing for the CCG in November, etc. However, none of that has been the case since at least 2012 or so if we're being generous and really since 2009. That's 15 years ago. Outside of a handful of blue blood programs, that's how football goes for literally every program in the country. You have some good years, you have smoe bad years and you have a lot of in between.
I know we hear about facilities, recruits, transfers, spring and fall practice standouts, NIL deals, donor support, etc and it's all good news and sunshine, but it also basically never means anything for the season at hand. At best that's an indication for whether you can feel safe hoping for the future, and even that requires several years in a row of everything pointing up if we're expecting to crawl out of the hole we lived in. None of which has happened since 2009. Yet we have people wanting players benched and coaches fired after one single game. People calling the season a dissappointment after one single game.
And to the one single game point, you can go back through every season of college football and find at least one 9+ win team who laid an early season egg, if not 2-3 throughout the year... but they still somehow got to 9+ wins, which I think everyone here would be throwing a party over if we could manage that. Yet the perspective seems to be lost on a lot of folks. I get it in game threads or even for the few hours afterward, but there's stuff even on Wednesdays and Thursdays that's so nonsensical and emotionally driven that I can't quite wrap my head around it.
So for those of you who are extremely down or upset, what gives? Is it irrational fanaticism? Do you just expect we will suddenly be Bama/Georgia out of nowhere? Is it simply cathartic to spew BS on a message board where there are no real consequences? Do you enjoy trolling? Do you have a similar attitude/approach toward life in general? I'm legitimately curious because I can't figure out how someone could watch Tech football for the past 15 years (or more), know anything about 90% of the other teams in college football, and still set expectations so high and put so much emotional well being on the line for something like this.
