The Boise State game is important to me, personally. As @RaceBannon said a while ago, that will tell us a lot. We have more talent, ostensibly we have great coaching. We should be able to beat a bunch of also-ran Pac-12 talent. The stadium will be electric, but so what? We know their personnel and we know what to expect.
The parallels with the 2010 BYU game are there. Conversely, Rick lost an opener to BYU as well and he went on to do okay (I mean, you know, just okay). So, I'm cautious to say that any one game tells the story.
I sort of expect @Gladstone to have it right if CCP is who we think he is (8-4 would also make sense). Talent matters and experience matters, but we have enough talent to be good against most of the teams on our schedule.
The teams we don't have talent to compete against are the elite teams like Oregon.
One thing I keep coming back to is that we were essentially a good team last year if we'd had decent QB play. The problem is, I don't know why we didn't.
Cyler (RIP) was awful. There's no disputing that. But so was everyone else, so that makes me think we were doing something weird with the QBs that made them all suck.
If we had gotten rid of extreme mental weakness and had decent QB play last year, we would've maybe only lost 2 games (UCLA and Oregon were the two teams that beat us solidly).
If we go 6-6, Petersen should be fired at the 50 yard line after the Apple Cup.
