8-4
To be clear, I could easily see winning 10 games regular season with a lot of luck, but
Reasons I am taking the Under, hopefully I am wrong about all of them:
- We are road underdogs to two top 10 teams with superior defensive lines. I don't know the stats, but I'd guess the win percentage in that type of games extremely low, and assume those are both losses.
- We brought in portal depth, which is good, but missed on the stars we needed (e.g. Addison, Steen) to substantively have an effect on the win column ceiling, rather we probably raised the floor.
- WR. We lost a lot of that room, both in numbers and in production and am not satisfied with how it was replaced either in recruiting or the portal. Also, pre season reports are not promising/a lot of unproven commodities. Understandably, not a lot of time to fix that for Mario.
- We need another couple cycles to improve the roster to the point that we have a distinct talent advantage over the middle of the conference teams. We are still mostly a roster of Diaz players. We will lose a game or two that we shouldn't, because the talent gap is too narrow.
edit/ As long as we don't get embarrassed by A&M and Clemson, don't get embarrassed by anyone in conference, and beat FSU, I will not be upset with 8-4 since we will have improved, even if I'd have liked to have seen a bigger jump.