prepares well and his game plans are solid in the big games. The problem is that in order for a less talented team to beat the Alabamas, Clemsons and Ohio States, is that the better team has to perform at a lower level than their normal. When we played Alabama in 2012 and this year they almost played to perfection and were more talented than us. Clemson in 2018 was a lot better than us as was Ohio State in 2015. However, if you notice the game plan against Alabama this year was pretty solid and though their offense was terrific a couple of plays by our offense might have gotten us some momentum, plus Alabama was clearly better than Ohio State too and our score in fact was closer and we could have made it appear even better if we score at the end. You know it is funny, Sean McDonough who usually is very fair to us spoke of Alabama blitzing us on the last play implying they did it because we called time out at the end. I don't know of any team that would have quit trying to score at the end and the fact that Alabama blitzed when time was running out was more of an unusual defensive call with 1 second on the clock than the fact we had a clock stoppage any way on the play before.
But to your main point, yes the fans do really only remember the playoff games and that is why I think we should hope we qualify every year rather than worrying about winning in an easier bowl at year end. I mean who cares that we beat Iowa State, the year before? More speed on the outside would have helped us big this year but I thought Kelly did a magnificent job getting the team to play as well as they did to get to the playoffs. It is not on him we just need that outside speed.
Also and you admitted this, the haters are always going to point out how we got blown out when other very good teams did too. Notice we are the only team that gets mentioned as "overrated".