I hope and believe the team will press to get better. Despite all of the injuries, we were 20 plays away from being undefeated. The stretching matters, a few inches could have swatted away two Tennessee touchdowns. missed tackles, too many to detail, should be a major point of emphasis. Bad angles, the 98 yard touchdown comes to mind and the Cory Davis plus 80 yard touchdown are two examples. The horrible play-calling that allowed our defense to get tired at times. Failing to make plays when your number is called. On a corner blitz, the corner goes unblocked and does not even touch the QB twice. Why would the coach call that players number twice in the same game where he completely whiffed?
I don't say this to appease the medi's, I say this to encourage us as fans to believe that we can win as well. We will have to replace a lot of instrumental players. Blair Brown and Tarell Basham, Casey Sales, Kurt Laseak will be sorely missed and Sebastian Smith and Watson will be huge losses on offense. I think we will have some players step up on the D-Line from the last few recruiting classes and would not be surprised to see some prep schoolers or JUCO's added to this class. We have good linebackers, but Browns hard demeanor, personality and production will be missed. Moore and Poling should be able to do a little more next year and Popp and Crouch should be productive as well. Can the coaches bring in the new personnel that we need? Can we close out plays? Can we perform consistently on offense? Will we defend the pass better? These are the questions that need to be answered.
One the flip side, we were 20 plays away from having a losing record as well, coaching and execution needs to separate us from the bottom feeders. We need to have a killer instinct and the will to get better on offense and not worry about offending coaches getting paid hundreds of thousands per year. FS called a spade a spade this year and yanked QB's and ridiculed the bad play-calling. What else will he do to get us over the hump?
Some of the problems he identified during the halves of the games were the defensive cushions and the lacking pass defense. He addressed some poor throws and poor play-calling.
Will we see these things change? No team is perfect, but good teams fill in the GAP's and that is what we need to do next year.

I agree

Anyone can go through a season and pick individual plays that were missed. You can't say our secondary is bad because Corey Davis scored a touchdown against us. But the trend was generally positive for an inexperienced and not deep enough group. I'm a lot more concerned about replacing key members of our front 7 next year (somewhere I agree with Monroe! Merry Christmas, buddy! :) )

I say our passing defense is bad because even though, we were in the top ten in sacks, whenever we faced a passing qb, we gave up at least 350 passing yards. Had Kent and Akron had their starting QB's we may have given up much more yardage there make us one of the nations worst pass defenses. I know it hurts, but it is true. We ended up being 104 of 128 FBS schools in passing yards allowed.

Did Madden ever intern with Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra? They would both be very proud of a statement like that. ;-)

+1