This win was the perfect Gundyball win. We beat a conference opponent by a super narrow margin by playing it safe. Game plan was blatantly obvious once our defense had success, which seemed pretty logical given how our opponent was playing. Once they were down a couple scores, they were pretty much toast. They just aren't built to score quickly. Gundy knew that, and just decided to coast on offense from that point on.
Bu I'm concerned that this win, particularly this style of win, gives Gundy more confidence in his "safety in simplicity" approach. It works if you want to beat teams like KSU, ISU, and Tulsa with regularity. It does not work if you want to compete for national championships. Unfortunately, our fanbase seems content with the former, and has little interest in the latter.
Our defense will keep us in games that shouldn't be close in the first place, because Gundy takes his foot off the gas too early. That works when you play weak opponents regularly, but is a losing strategy against who we really want to compete with.
Let's stop and realized that we just beat Iowa State by 3 points at home.
Good win in and of itself. But it just exposes Gundy's weak approach to gamedays. I seriously think he hates the actual games. He starts trying to run the clock out and get them over with as soon as we get up one score. And for those of you saying this is "new".......just lol. This is Gundyball, and it's been Gundyball with the exception of the Holgersen/Monken years. It's just that once every 15 years, we actually have a good enough defense and/or run game to win at a slightly higher rate, and that's about it. This style will get destroyed by any team with equal or better athletes and even halfway decent coaching. Really interested to see how we handle Tejas and uo. I think we can beat both due to our defense, but it'll definitely give us a better indicator of where we are.