Anybody that thinks that you're going to win at the highest levels every year has never played sports in their life. Winning is hard. The margin that separates winning and losing is often very, very small.
The reason I fell in love with Washington and why Saturday afternoons during the Fall mean so much to me is because of what it represents. It represents tradition. It represents work. It represents effort. It represents doing your best and giving your all. It represents playing for the person next to you as much and more than playing for yourself. And when all of those things are done right, it represents excellence at the highest level.
This is a world class institution located in one of the best cities in the world. We (the University, its alumni, and supporters) should never accept that we're not good enough. The only limit on how good we can be is ourselves and what we consider to be acceptable or not.
If we go 8-4 each year and are representative of what want, then I'm ok with that if that's the best that we can do. But if we go 8-4, we should have a burning drive to want to be better than 8-4 the next year.
And if there's anything about the last 10+ years it has been that those that have been guiding the University of Washington football program have not possessed the kind of drive and determination to be anything less than accepting of being mediocre (or worse).
I know that this is cliche, but the role of a football coach at a University isn't just to win football games, it's also to prepare his players for life after college. The great coaches are the ones where you look at his players 20 years after they graduate and they are successful regardless of whether they played professionally. For the first time since Don James, we have a coach leading this program that I honestly feel is 100% behind the success of our players both on and off the field.