I've avoided the board for a while because the games were so terrible so I'm probably in the minority, but I'm still onboard with Golson. A large percentage of his INTs were flukes (batted passes, deflected, etc.) and some of the fumbles resulted from horrible protection. Now some of those fumbles were horrible and completely his fault. However, I did notice that he is protecting the ball better and sliding earlier instead of taking the hit. What I'm banking on is that he experiences the same 3rd-year bump that Quinn and Clausen did (Jimmy threw 17 INTs his sophomore year). Also, if he's not going to keep the ball on a read-option, can we please run from another freaking formation?
Yeah sorry, that was toned more negatively than I intended. I hate board negativity because football is supposed to be fun! I can make up ten thousand reasons to kill hope about the future of any program, and especially ours. When I go online and those get reinforced, it makes it not fun. Hope and excitement are fun, even when they're misguided. I also believe that the future of our program is ultimately bright, that we have a ton of advantages that other programs don't have, and that Kelly is a good coach who has suffered an undue quantity of bad luck. He's also frustratingly stubborn sometimes.
Golson has a lot of potential, but his pattern of mistakes is frustrating to see. I guess what I intended was that I HOPE he gets better, and am excited to see his improvement as I would be excited to see Malik tear it up. I just want to see competent quarterback play in the service of ND, consistently and thoroughly, even if it's not exceptional.
I also think that there are things that are uniquely ND and will not and should not ever change. We do not recruit "Wall Street" players, but we have minimum standards that are already far less than those of the rest of the student body and if we started recruiting thugs I'd be done with football (see: Alabama's national champion thugs beating a student unconscious for vending machine money,
From national championship to jail for 4 Alabama football players - CNN.com). We shouldn't be afraid to play Navy, and even if we were, we made them a promise and we'll be keeping that promise until the end of time or else it isn't ND football anymore. We're independent dammit; we've always been independent and because of the sheer degree of bigotry shown to the Irish when we tried to join a conference originally, it's now part of our identity to be independent. We shouldn't join a conference because it's easier; we should only join a conference if there is no other damn way to be the best in the country. Our identity is worth more than that.
