Any criticisms lobbed at the special teams I'm 100% fine with. That's been an issue basically the entire tenure under Campbell.
The offense has not been a problem. In fact, historically this is the best offensive era for Cyclone football ever.
These 5 games have not been good, but we also lost arguably the best QB in school history, arguably the best RB in school history, and arguably the TWO best TE's in school history. We're down to our 3rd and 4th string RB's. Is the offense not good? You bet, it's pretty dang frustrating to watch right now. But I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater considering what we've seen under Campbell's offensive staff.
Understandable but there have always been warning signs with the offense - no knock on Brock or the TE's but I honestly think the offense was the way it was for 2-3 years mostly because of David and Breece. David with his ability to just tell defenders "get off me" and Breece's ability to run into a brick wall 9 times and then on the 10th he's out for an 70 yard touchdown run.
Also on the offensive line - we haven't had a "nasty" player in a while. I can't remember if it was Good-Jones but a few years back Campbell and Myers were all over an offensive linemen for getting a personal foul after the play because he took a shot at a defender - while I"m never going to promote taking cheap shots, we don't have that mean streak it doesn't seem in an offensive linemen.
Last year I talked about how we lacked answers when teams blitzed and stacked the box - I thought it was because Brock didn't the biggest arm in the world and we lacked a down field threat. Well, now we have a bigger armed QB and a deep threat, at least one (Stanely) and yet we still don't have answers for teams who blitz a lot and stack the box so clearly, that short coming was more of a scheme.
Honestly I think two things need to happen. Campbell and Manning need to realize - that unless the team suddenly gets healthy , stays healthy and takes a huge leap forward - that we don't have the personnel to play the way they want. And we're going to have to dig a little deeper into the bag of tricks.