There’s dozens of specific reasons we could be better and dozens why we could be worse than last year. Too many for me to want to list all of them. The general factors will be:
- How much our young players develop throughout the course of the season
- If we’re healthier on defense and/or less healthy on offense compared to last year
- How well our free agent signings gel (or don’t gel) in a new system
- Unforeseen regressions from players that were on the team last year (e.g. Kincaid, Oliver, Rasul last year)
- An underrated one is how much Babich and Brady improve after their first full seasons as coordinators
Im trending more towards us being better than last year, but I’ve also told myself that before 4 of the last 5 seasons. And the one season I thought we would be worse was last year and it ended up being our best season of the McBeane/Allen era. The truth is we really won’t have a good idea until a few months into the season at least.