Having gotten Hyper-Panic Mode out of my system, I decided it was time to regain a level head about our football season going forward.  What can we logically expect?  What should we logically expect?  These questions matter if we want to gauge if the team is improving from here or getting worse.

I looked up stats on espn.go.com regarding the teams we played our horrible games against:  Washington, UCLA, and WSU.  I chose them because they are three of the four most recent, and it's safe to say they exemplify where we fear we are.  Cal is omitted because of the Riley injury + Cal-road phenomena, but more relevantly, I don't think any of us Beavers are afraid of the team playing like it did against Cal.

Here is where these three opponents stack up, and how we performed against them (all stats exclude overtime points):

Yikes.  As we can see from the stats, on average, these teams lose by 2 touchdowns (13 points.)  And we lost to all of them. (I need a moment to mourn, continued after the jump)

Okay, I'm better now.  So here's why these stats are useful:  They let us predict the scores for our remaining games, assuming the Beavers play their last three games like they did these three games.

If we continue to play as we have, here is what we can expect:

Double yikes! We lose to USC 41-14, lose to Stanford 47-10, and lose the Civil War 59-8. The scary thing is that these predictions sound extremely reasonable, and unless the team finds some way to pull things together, they will become reality. I don't want to believe that our closest remaining game of the season is a 41-14 blowout at Reser against Lane Kiffin's contraceptive devices.

A point of interest is that despite the poor defensive play we've been lamenting lately, the stats say our biggest problem is our lack of offense.  In fact, they suggest our offense is three times as bad as our defense (17% vs. 51%.)

Anyway, with some of Beaver Nation talking about coaching staff changes and the like, I think these predictions are a reasonable baseline to see if we start improving at all from now on or not, as well as the degree.  It's what I'll be using to gauge if we're on the right track, or if we are, in fact, truly continuing to play like the inept Beaver team that's shown up lately.