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COLUMN: Aggie fans designated “distraught” on ESPN happiness index

Reno sports fans are happier than we are, and that’s just not something I’m willing to accept.

When the recent ESPN ranking of every college football program in the country’s general contentment found its way onto my Twitter feed (thanks, Tommy), the three Mountain West teams in the national Top 50 were no surprise — 

Boise fans are all in this year after barely missing out on a shot at the 2016 conference title. San Diego knows finally graduating star running back Donnel Pumphrey won’t damage its odds of dominating its craptastic division for the third straight year even a little bit. Rams fans expecting a middle-of-the-road 2016 were pleasantly surprised by Colorado State’s intriguing ability to go against the grain, shout “defense is for suckers” at the football gods and proceed to win games by scoring points in droves, best punctuated by a rollicking 63-31 beatdown in San Diego.

But then way down at the bottom of the list, below Fresno State’s perpetual mediocrity, below San Jose’s heroic struggle to field a complete team, even below freaking UNR which somehow managed to take a break from torching anything bearing Colin Kaepernick’s likeness to win three conference games, there lies the Utah State Aggies.

Last place in happiness, distraught in its apparent irrelevancy.

The criteria for these rankings falls into the six categories listed above, and though perhaps slightly flawed depending on how they’re weighted, those six points are certainly fair pillars to build a happiness index on. Rivalry wins matter, staff stability matters, all of those things affect a fanbase’s general attitude. And of course, like any underperforming team the Aggies are going to post pretty poor numbers for a few categories. Coaching stability? Fair. Rivalry dominance? Also fair. But look at that miserable twitter buzz! Y’all have got to lighten up.

That final number, a ranking of how fans are hyping the season on social media, leaves Utah State fans looking like curmudgeonly Clint Eastwood types in what should be the literal peak period for offseason hype. Look at the Cleveland Browns — they have some of the most tortured fans in all of sports. Their front office is paying Brock Osweiler private island money. They have sucked for an unreasonable number of years. And yet, bounce over to r/NFL on reddit and you’ve got Deshone Kizer hype! Myles Garrett is the living breathing embodiment of Draft Day’s Vontae Mack! Will their season crash and burn? Of course it will! Because Browns! But you have to at least be open to the possibility of something good happening, otherwise what’s the point of watching the games?

Look, I get it. College football fandom tends to be volatile, often without much of a happy medium between total bright-as-the-noonday-sun exuberance and abject failure. Some years you’re 11-2 and on top of the world. Others, you stumble to 3-9 by finding new and exciting ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But somewhere in that middle-ground exists a satisfactory realm I like to call “Bowl eligibility”  — and what’s more, I think your 2017 Utah State Aggies are about to rediscover it.

That’s right, buckle up sports fans. There are reasons to be happy in Aggieland.

Before any of you go crying about the apparent homerism of writing for USU student media about why USU might actually be kind of good this season, let’s establish something important — I’m not above criticizing this team. We ran a headline after last year’s CSU collapse that read “Three weeks til basketball season” in about 800-pt font, and we were damn proud of it. I’ve personally written several columns over the last four years criticizing coaching decisions, personnel decisions, quarterback play, the awful state of Utah State’s special teams unit and more. But now, a 3-9 year has a lot of traditionally optimistic fans nervously blocking out Brent Guy flashbacks, wondering if the Aggies’ 2012 peak was only a brief, breathtaking Everest amidst a miserable Laramie-like wasteland riddled with forgettable 2- and 3-win teams. Playing the role of the optimist is uncharted territory for me, but it seems like the Aggie fam needs a pick-me-up.

The bad stuff

I’m sure we’ve got a few recently returned missionaries out there who want to know how USU went from 10-4 and beating BYU on the road to 3-9 brown paper bag territory, so let’s get this out of the way. Lucy yanked the football away from the charging Aggies five separate times last season, leaving players and fans alike flat on their backs staring up into a cruel grey world where Wyoming and Colorado State were actually kind of good. Utah State went 0-5 in one possession games, gave up second half leads on a weekly basis and finished with one solitary conference win (against Fresno, which barely even counts). An almost entirely joyless 2016 campaign directly resulted in all 28 media voters slotting Utah State in last place in the Mountain Division this season. It also resulted in USU’s shiny freshman wideout Rayshad Lewis bolting for his hometown Maryland team.

Yes, it seemed like the sky was falling. In fact it did fall. Attendance crumpled, Cache Valley turned its attention to the basketball team, the demand for televised games evaporated, and now after a summer of ceaseless negativity and road construction coach Wells and Kent Myers are tasked with picking up the pieces.

The good stuff, starting with Matt Wells

To be blunt, nobody has more skin in the game than Matt Wells. Yes, he’s a head coach probably coaching for his job this season. He’s also an Aggie alum, relatively new to the HC position and totally willing to do something roughly 95 percent of college coaches are generally unwilling to do — adapt.

Wells’ opening statement to us down at Vegas media days in July went like this — “Having the season we had last year, it makes you reevaluate everything. With how you recruit, how you train, how you develop and how you practice, to schemes, to your coaches, everything. I made a change on offense, a change on staff on defense…It’s made me go back and as a head coach reevaluate everything.” 

Coach Wells keeps it real. Forward thinking is a hard quality to find in a head coach, and Wells certainly isn’t married to forcing his players to play “his way” judging by the Yost hiring. This program is now all-in on new OC David Yost’s “efficiency above everything” mentality to move the football, and Wells is willing to incorporate the playstyle of the athletes in his locker room into an offensive philosophy rather than sticking to a set system. Maybe we don’t try to bulldoze guys in the run game or lob passes to the sideline anymore, but instead stretch the field with quick, aggressive passing and keep defenses honest with shifty light-footed backs in the ground game. Aggie fans need a reason to stay interested, and in Yost’s offense, the ball moves in a hurry.

Good stuff pt II: Offensive and defensive playmakers

Kent Myers and Dallin Leavitt aren’t 3-9 guys. On some level all Aggie fans have to know that. In fact, last year’s 3-9 team wasn’t even a 3-9 team. They were probably a good team, maybe a bowl-eligible team, with an unfortunate disposition to come out flat in third quarters and surrender double-digit leads. One of the loudest arguments against the Aggies potential this year is “What changed? Who do we have now that we didn’t have then?”

Not to spoil one of my upcoming pieces for our annual football preview magazine (plug!), but this team oozes potential breakout candidates — Justus Te’i, Adewale Adeoye and Dax Raymond all look immensely promising. But finding diamond-in-the-rough type guys risks missing the stars right in front of your face. Dallin Leavitt is nice and pissed off and healthy this year. The always-angry attitude-era defensive spark is probably an all-conference safety if USU beats Air Force and New Mexico in ‘16 to justify the selection, and definitely the first guy you pick to have your back in any fight anywhere for any reason.

Jalen Davis is out to prove he belongs on an NFL roster — and he just might. The rest of the secondary is incredibly deep, with guys like Wesley Bailey fending off competition from JUCO transfer Deante Fortenberry and a host of other qualified candidates.

And of course, Kent Myers. If anyone catches as much flak for losing as the head coach, it’s the quarterback. Sure, the playcalling may have been poor, the line play poor, the field position poor, and the entire look and feel of last season generally poor, but Myers is still a dual-threat QB who can be pretty special under the right offensive direction. While Myers would certainly benefit from a more accurate deep ball, the senior is still fourth in program history in completion percentage (60.5) and his career TD:INT ratio currently rests at 31:14. Myers will not lose this team any games, and may even win them one or two this season if his connection with Ron’Quavion Tarver advances a step.

It’s still a team sport with a lot of moving parts to analyze, but it’s not like Utah State is devoid of players who can turn games around. True, you can do a write-up like this for every team in the conference (that’s literally what Tommy’s doing right this second), but that’s the whole point. The Mountain West is a crazy conference where a team like Wyoming can field a stud running back and an NFL prospect under center and still be picked to finish last, only to earn a spot in the conference title game within a span of four months. It happened last year, and will continue to happen for as long as offseason sports writing exists.

Good stuff pt. III: Schedule, mojo and mentality

Utah State’s unhappy fans have a point. Last year sucked. It was especially damaging to watch a team that should’ve been pretty decent toss away games in Ft. Collins (led 24-10, got shut out in second half), Reno (led 37-24 with seven minutes left, fumbled game away) and at home against New Mexico (led 21-3 in third quarter). Personally, I consider a tight game in Boise and the infamous touchdown robbery against Air Force even more heartbreaking than the others; win either of those games, and your season looks completely different. Instead it was an emotionally taxing season that destroyed any sense of momentum (Coach Wells terms it “mojo”) game by game. Utah State seemed to lose key cogs (Leavitt, Devante Mays) at the worst times, and personified the phrase “playing not to lose.” In their last three games, the Aggies out-paced opposing offenses by 1.6 yards per play and still somehow managed to lose every one.

It may seem counterintuitive that losing tight games is usually a positive indicator for the following season, but it does makes sense that merely being in a position to win increases the odds of doing so. If USU is in five one-possession games this fall, it seems rather unlikely the team would drop every one of them (as they did last year).

This season is also entirely different from a mental standpoint. The Aggies have an obvious chip on their shoulder and a lot to prove — a theme present in every interview and practice since January — but at the same time almost no expectations. Last year’s patchwork front seven was expected to compete with pro-caliber running backs every other week, and still folks were predicting eight or nine wins for the inexperienced squad. Myers’ OL protection did its best impression of the tape stretched across the finish line at the end of your annual neighborhood 5K. The best running back on the team had NFL written all over him and then missed most of the season. Body language on the sideline looked miserable. Nobody looked like they had fun at any point.

Shift to this August, where I’ve heard win projections for Utah State as high as 7-5 and (more commonly) as low as 1-11. That’s a ceiling of “Maybe we’ll be better than .500” and a floor of “Who cares, we suck.” And yet, the attitude around the locker room is simply “nobody believes in us, let’s prove them wrong.” My honest expectation is 6-6, with one of those wins being totally flukey (that’s a discussion for another day, I’m already 1,800 words deep into discussing this dumb happiness index).

With a schedule laden with easier road games and playing host to Boise State, Wyoming, CSU and BYU, there’s a shot that flukey game comes against a conference power. If USU can beat the Rams at home after taking care of business against Idaho State and SJSU, a 3-3 start will see this team well on its way to bowl eligibility. Three more wins against UNLV, Hawaii and New Mexico are entirely plausible. A bonus win in a tough place to play like Air Force or at out-of-conference foe Wake Forest is just frosting.

Don’t forget how easy it is for public perception of a team to slip in and out of favor week to week. I took a shot at Colorado State fans earlier for expecting a mediocre season, but look again at how content they are with their team here in late August.

The thing is, the fans were totally right — the Rams were the definition of middle-of-the-road in 2016, finishing 5-3 in the conference and tied for fourth in the division. I see no reason that couldn’t be Aggie fans this time next year. That’s a record well within reach for this team, and if that’s all it takes to swing USU into ESPN’s Top 50 happiest fan bases, maybe we should all lighten up a bit before declaring this season a waste.