On the back of the most disappointing loss of the season against Portland State, I did what no one should have done, which was combing through the Cal Poly sports message boards.
As expected from a group of people that are somewhat anonymous and seemingly all alumni or very connected to Cal Poly football, they are a passionate group.
Nothing posted is going to end up on Message Board Geniuses (an underrated follow on X), but they are where the majority of discourse on Cal Poly athletics occurs.
On this cold Saturday night (and into Sunday morning) I got to see a fanbase that was stuck on the anger and bargaining portions of the five stages of grief.
We had anger. The anger of whatever hope of playoffs that the team had left dashed on home turf. Anger at the coaching staff, the program and the powers that have supposedly allowed this all to transpire.
The bargaining was particularly fun to read. Bargaining about what would happen if the team ran the table the rest of the season, what should happen in the future with new facilities like the Madden Center.
While the losses earlier this season did not instill the greatest hope, they were also backed with the understanding that all the teams that Cal Poly was losing to were all quality teams.
The Mustangs currently sport the third highest strength of schedule of any team in the FCS, only trailing the Indiana State Sycamores (Missouri Valley) and Colombia (Ivy League). Both are in premier FCS conferences like the Big Sky conference.
Cal Poly was coming off three straight games against top-10 programs, and before that took on a top-25 ranked team in Sacramento State.
Portland State was not anywhere close to that level.
Portland State was a game that you almost checked off as a victory before you even tossed the coin.
But the 0-8 squad that barely could score a dozen points a game and came into the contest as 18-point underdogs, left San Luis Obispo as winners.
READ MORE: Cal Poly Football swaps quarterbacks, give up 40 to winless Portland State
So that begs the question, is the season beyond saving?
While the frequent flyers on the message board believe so, I think there is a lot of nuance that gets lost in the static.
Crucially, the team has played in way closer games to teams that dominated them just last season.
For example, last season UC Davis put them behind the woodshed in Davis, as did Montana at home.
This season? Davis was a one possession game and Cal Poly held Montana scoreless on the road for three quarters.
The team has taken a step forward when it comes to actually competing to win football games, even if the end result doesn’t result in a victory. As much as it would have been nice to be legitimate contenders for playoff football post Thanksgiving, it probably wasn’t going to happen.
So if you can’t view the season in a wins and losses standpoint, you have to view it from a process standpoint.
This is where the team falls extremely short in my opinion.
The most important question to answer: who is the quarterback? We are ten weeks into the season and have had no clear QB1 for at least five weeks of it.
The first battle between Anthony Grigsby and Ty Dieffenbach ended in some form of a no contest after both dealt with injury at some point before or during the Stephen F. Austin game.
The only clear answer to who QB1 was is when Dieffenbach was out and Bo Kelly was leading the offense for the stretch of games.
But as soon as Dieffenbach returned, the second quarterback battle between Kelly and Dieffenbach started.
This is still an ongoing bout, with Kelly throwing a haymaker with his performance against Montana State after Dieffenbach was benched. Dieffenbach responded with a great performance against Portland State after Kelly threw just one pass.
The shuffling of quarterbacks is like a jawbreaker. If you just take two licks of a jawbreaker, then swap it out for a ham sandwich because you don’t like the taste of the jawbreaker shell you never really wanted a jawbreaker in the first place.
It’s the same thing with quarterbacks, if you bench someone after two drives and a couple of passes, you never really were confident in your decision to play them.
Another bit of the process that leaves a lot to be desired is the ability to learn from mistakes.
READ MORE: Cal Poly Football looking to find stability against Idaho State amid four-game slide
Let’s go back to the game against Portland State. Down by two scores and around six minutes to go in the game, Cal Poly punted it away on fourth and four.
Does that sound somewhat familiar? It should, it’s the almost the exact decision that I had called out against UC Davis at the beginning of the month.
Guess what? Almost the exact same thing happened. Cal Poly got a “stop” (the Vikings didn’t score but burned almost four minutes off the clock), were able to score quickly to cut the lead to one possession, and failed to recover the onside kick to end the game.
If this decision happened one time? Sure. Not great, but sure.
Twice? I’ll leave it to what Rita Mae Brown wrote in her novel “Sudden Death”: “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”