Folks are just taking the lack of excitement as a cudgel against their other pet peeves (Fuente doesn't open the program enough, I want more information, Beamer should've never retired, I'm hungry, are we there yet?), but everyone who watched even 1 game of Tech football last year can see where it's at.

The defense sucked ass last year, and while it's going to be better, it's not going to top 10 or 20 or whatever other deluded fantasies people have. There's going to still be too much youth, too many busted plays, to perform at a truly high level, it's probably going to go from being bad to being average.

The offense is not quite in as bad a position, but there's going to be new OL, most skill players still young, so there's still going to be a bunch of mistakes. Furthermore, with Jackson gone, it's going to be the Ryan Willis show unless he gets injured. But, this is also his last year, so there's no anticipation buildup for The Future, your only hope is that he goes full Case Keenum and throws for like 5500+ yards this year. Guarantee you if Willis gets his throwing hand trapped in an indestructible honey jar, suddenly everyone will be more interested in 2019, because whether it's Hooker or Patterson, now whatever happens in 2019 is thought of as growth for future seasons.

Finally, as many people have noted, even the AD, the home schedule this year is just bad, there's no getting around it. Really, the overall schedule isn't interesting, the most notable game is the away game at Notre Dame. No Clemson, no Florida State, hell even NC State would break up the monotony a little bit, played them twice in the last 9 years.

Fuente could post the entirety of every spring scrimmage this year on Youtube from 20 different camera angles and offer completely commentary from all coaches and it still isn't going to the change the fact that 2019 is almost certainly an intermediate year no matter how you slice it. It's a year that the fans just want to be over with already, because the most realistic thing they can do is win a couple more games. If they somehow win the division, it's going to be a fluke of other teams self-destructing, and then they get to play a team that didn't just beat Alabama for the title, they completely smoked them.

2019 is going to be an extremely interesting year in terms of player development for almost all the 2-deep on both sides of the ball. It's not going to be very interesting in terms of win/loss record or anything like that.