Time to start thinking like winners. If you're 6-6, you might as well be 5-7. Saves you a bowl game no one watches. If you're 9-3, a win against Texas gets you a pretty reward.
This is wrong. Going 5-7 with a loss to Texas is literally NOT the same as the extra practices for underclassmen and game experience for the team that a 6-6 bowl provides. Struggling teams need every oppurtunity to get out of the gutter. Also, nobody is saying having a win against Texas on the way to a 9-3 season isn't great, what we are saying is that the team currently isn't ready to go 8-3 in all the other games. If we can't even get to a bowl game, we aren't ready for Texas. It remains to be seen if Lovie can get this team to a bowl game this year.
I'm sure someone has already mentioned this but I haven't read this whole thread, but look at Northwestern for your example. While we scheduled tough non con games, they scheduled easy. They built recruiting with consecutive bowl seasons and kept building upon it until it became an odd thing when Northwestern WASN'T in a bowl. They now have 10-2 seasons while we struggle to get out of the basement of the B1G West.
Rebuilding a brand and perception takes time and becoming a consistent bowl team helps build perception and experience with extra playing time. To be a bowl team when you're weak means you need to schedule wins. We don't need to worry about scheduling big games to show our chops, we play tOSU and UM 3 out of the next 4 years.
Let's become bowlers before we try to act like ballers.
Completely and totally wrong. There's no time to "learn to walk", there's winning and losing. 2006 was so bad no one thought 2007 was coming. This board is overflowing with defeatism. Anything can happen with our caliber of coaching staff. You schedule any good opponent you can, honestly.
Wrong again. 2007 happened because we had a huge influx of young instant impact talent in 2006 to go along with the role players being coached up. We don't have that yet with Lovie so let's not go crazy with scheduling until the 5 stars come rolling in. Also, the 2007 season was great but we went 9-3 instead of 10-2 because we lost to powerhouse Missouri that year in the first game of the season. We could have started 6-0 but instead were 5-1. Thank goodness tOSU went to the championship that year otherwise our 9-3 Illini wouldn't have gotten the Rose Bowl and back then the difference between 10-2 and 9-3 could be a big factor on deciding bowl games. (It still is now...)