Football Pergatory

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Cautious Optimism

    -The Beercat

After posting a second half prediction of the football Bearcats my hopes and dreams were shot down by the Temple Owls in OT on Saturday. I thought we would bring home a W from Philly. That didn’t happen. Instead, our Bearcats panicked the last couple of minutes of the game. The first 3 minutes of the game is highly forgettable too. (A lost fumble on 3rd down and a botched return added onto a Temple touchdown where the receiver landed out of bounds. If you add in the ref icing our freshmen kicker you have a hell of Saturday afternoon) All of this while Temple was without its RB1 Ryquell Armstead.

Can you blame me for thinking the Bearcats could go 11-1 after starting off 6-0? Yeah beating USF is a stretch but if we would have been undefeated heading into that game in Nippert. What a stage that would have been. A perfect one for College Gameday to finally highlight in Clifton. If we win Saturday in Dallas and Nov 3 against Navy, two games that will be an absolute dog fight the next two games will be highly anticipated by Bearcats fans.

Here’s what I’m currently thinking. 8 weeks ago not many people had the Bearcats at 6-0 going into the bye week. Still not a lot of people had them 6-1 at this point. Moving forward though we’re caught in football fan purgatory. What does that mean? I feel like our fanbase doesn’t know how to feel right now. We’re caught in between preseason expectations and the redrawn expectations after going 6-0. Winning when you feel like you shouldn’t be is certainly much sweeter than expecting it. So you get addicted to that sweetness and expect more of it. That’s what happened before last Saturday’s game.

Sure some fans might have kept “realistic” expectations for this team and still have them. That’s fine, but the feeling you get when your team is winning against the odds makes it harder to keep those realistic expectations you started off with before week 1. It’s not wrong to reset expectations. That’s what I did before week 7. I expected the Cincinnati Football Bearcats to win every game in the second half of the season, except one. (UCF if you couldn’t guess)

If before the season started you told me the Bearcats would be 6-6 and bowl eligible I would have said,

“Hey! We’re getting there! A bowl game will be fun, what’s that even like anyway?”

But now after winning the first 6, losing the last 6 would almost be devastating. No one wants to end a season with 6 straight losses, especially if one is to ECU. Yeah we’re still bowl eligible but we’d have absolutely no momentum going into it.

So what do we do now? We proceed with cautious optimism. Maybe some of you were already doing that? Maybe after the bye week I was living dangerously. Let’s ride this thing out a couple of more games to see where we land this season. We hit #20 in the country, that was fun but maybe a bit too much too soon.

Beat SMU this week and get us back into Historic Nippert on Nov 3rd.

I hope to see all of you at The Den’s watch party at Taft’s Brewpourium on Saturday at 3:30pm! I’ll be the guy drinking delicious beer dressed in red and black!