Of course, pretty much all teams improve throughout the year. But I think I've seen enough ball to recognize when one does more of it than the norm.
dunno. i mean i saw quite a few xu games this year too. they looked like basically the same team to me. they just played poorly against kstate. one bad game, not an entire early season pattern of underachievement.
also, if you look at their schedule, the two best teams they faced aside from ksu, they played back in dec. they lost to baylor and butler by 5 and 1 in a neutral and a road. i'd argue that those are more impressive results than any game since beating florida.
Yep, I see right where your coming from. And if anyone just glanced at the schedule results it does look like about the same team all year long. You say you've seen a few of their games this year so maybe you think that based on their play too. But I'm saying if I never saw a score result all year long, and just watched them play, I'd say clearly this is a much improved team. And that's pretty much what I usually try to do. You can get in trouble judging a team by just running down the schedule.
And if you want to talk schedule results, keep in mind that 5 point loss to Baylor was during the Old Spice Classic that Baylor didn't even bother showing up to. In the three days prior they had lost to fracking 'Bama and took OT to take care of IONA.
Butler loss, eh, I could argue they match up well with them, or that moral victories don't mean anything, you can point those out all over the place. But really I'm not arguing schedule results. I'm just saying from a guy who's seen what I would guess is a lot more of Xavier than the average person I see a lot different team now. One that if we don't play a good, not even average game, could knock us off. I'm sure Frank is telling them something like that over and over again in film this week. Hope it sticks.
That said, I'm confident in this teams focus right now. 82-74 cats. But we gotta bring it.