(Written by kencraw)

OK, this Bear Fan is finally coming out of hibernation…

Not that I haven’t been busy. We’ve got another new Crawford in the house as of July 5th. This time it’s a girl, so apparently I only have girls when the Bears have a losing season. 🙂 In any case, the last two months have gone by in a flash, so sorry for the even slower than usual off-season.

I’ll be posting pretty regularly from here on out. I hope to get in a few looking back posts before the season starts (I need to clear some space off the Tivo before I can put more games on it, after all). And of course I’ll have my game-by-game predictions and general thoughts. Plus I’m sure Jason and I will do our regular podcasts.

But until then, I’ll start with this:

I don’t think there’s been a year since 2002 where there have been as widely different expectations between fans. It’s no surprise really. Last year was a huge letdown. We lost a lot of key players. But yet somehow in the middle of that, there’s a lot of reasons for hope. With, two new QB’s in the hopper (one coming of age (Bridgeford), one transferring in (Maynard)), and with our young defense has a lot of returners back and our offensive line looking pretty experienced, it’s not outrageous to think that this year has most of the pieces needed to be something special.

And if that weren’t enough, you’ve got the external factors. The “neutral” site game against Fresno State. Home games in San Francisco. The 1st year of the Pac-12 which includes and playing new teams, not playing other teams, and compressing the schedule by one week (to make room for the conference championship game). It all makes for a lot of wildcards.

But amongst all those wildcards you can call me cautiously optimistic. I’m fairly confident this will be a bowl eligible team, particularly if the Bears get through the non-conference games unscathed (something I expect).

I also expect more consistent play. The defense isn’t going to have games like the USC or Nevada games this year. The offense won’t fall off a cliff if any one person gets injured (not like last year with Riley).

But consistent play and bowl eligible might look a lot more like 7-5 mediocrity than challenging for that Rose Bowl berth we’ve all been dying for.