Possible Bad Surprises for this Year

Last year I wrote about how the success of a football team is frequently influenced by surprises. For example, part of the reason MSU had a great year in 2011 was because the linebackers were surprisingly good. Most people expected a drop-off after Greg Jones and Erick Gordon graduated, but Bullough and company stepped in and may have outplayed the 2010 linebacking unit. An example of negative surprise occurred last year when the passing game flopped much worse than anyone imagined. Most people expected some problems, but not the astonishing futility we witnessed.

Of course, surprises are by definition unpredictable. In fact, my 2012 post on surprises turned out to be kind of off the mark. Actually, I accurately identified some of the bad surprises, but I was way wrong in thinking they wouldn't happen. The D-line did end up missing Worthy quite a bit more than expected, the O-line suffered key injuries that made it much weaker than expected, and the passing game was abysmal. Shoot, the kicking game turned out to be a bad surprise. Anyway, despite their unpredictability, it's still fun to try to anticipate surprises, so here goes.  

Let's start with the bad surprises (next post will consider the good kind). I do think that the probability a bad surprise will emerge on defense is pretty low.  Maybe, we could end up with something like Trae Waynes struggling more than expected, or the defensive tackles struggling again to be disruptive. But overall, I think the defense is solid enough to overcome those surprises.

On offense, one bad surprise could be that the best O-line in the Dantonio era struggles again. With all the talent and experience, we are expecting this unit to finally perform at a relatively high level. But what if Skylar Burkland retires, one of the other OTs gets injured, and redshirt freshman Jack Conklin has to step in and he struggles? The good thing is that the depth at the guard and center positions is good enough to mitigate most surprises on the interior of the line (except perhaps injuries to 3 guards - at that point we can be certain that somebody has put a hex on this O-line). Still, OT is the danger area, just sitting there waiting to strike.

Another bad surprise on offense would be finding out that last year's receiver play was not a fluke, that while this crop of receivers and tight ends is perhaps MSU's most athletic ever, they are just too prone to dropping the ball and running bad routes. Oh man, would that suck. This surprise would pretty much condemn MSU to another year of offensive futility, and would really destroy much of the momentum MSU has acquired in the Dantonio era. I would have to call this the worst possible surprise, so let's hope to high heaven that it does not play out.

I am expecting Andrew Maxwell to play much better this year, but there is a reasonable probility that he could struggle again. Still, I don't think this bad surprise would be as destructive as some of the other surprises because MSU is now loaded at quarterback. If Maxwell struggles, I'm confident one of the other quarterbacks would be able to step in and play at a decent level -- maybe not at a star level, but at an acceptable level.

The final surprise would be a kicking game that goes backwards. As much as Dan Conroy struggled last year, he still made 72 percent of his field goal attempts (23-for-32).  Hopefully, this year's kicker will at least match what Conroy did last year, but it's also quite possible that by the end of this year, we will find ourselves wishing for the "good old days" of the kicking game. This bad surprise would be pretty damaging, perhaps not quite as bad as poor play from the receivers, but it would be bad enough to cost MSU at least a few games -- especially if the offense struggles again.

Last year I said the surprises were not likely to happen and they did, so what should I say this year? Maybe I'll just go with something like this: "Dear Universe, please don't let any of these bad surprises happen, especially the one about receivers and the kicking game..."