re: If you were to cling to optimism...

1) Sometimes teams aren't firing on all cylinders in week 1. I'm guessing this happens because some issues didn't show up in practice. Let's hope that is the case here.

2) It was a day game, and we always suck in day games. I don't know why, but we need to fix that soon. Maybe we need to bring in a psychologist. Maybe we need fewer vampires and more day walkers. idk, but I'm very tired of it.

3) We shuffled the O-Line. They might need some time to gel. They could get much better.

4) We installed a new defense. They seemed a little tentative and the tackling needs to get better, but they could get stout in a hurry. They were pretty tough in the red zone. Furthermore, as Wisky went through this with Aranda a few years ago, they were in a position to know what would cause our players trouble out of the box.

5) The run pass ratio was 58/42, which is a pretty big shift from the 70/30 we've been seeing. Plus, we actually went for a 4th and 1 in our own half of the field. Even though the resulting Wisky FG may have cost us the game, it does at least show that Les is trying to open up the offense. Whether he is capable of doing that successfully is yet to be seen.

6) Previously I was agitated that we threw nothing but long balls. Now we are calling more intermediate routes. Yes, we have a long way to go. That being said, I would like to have seen a bit more long ball against Wisky. It seems like the one time we did our receiver got hauled down.

So... It was bad, but there's hope.