I think the more interesting question is what does this mean for fans like beeware? Beeware has stated repeatedly that his standard for this team is 10 wins. Since he did not hold O'leary to the same standard the year before, is he trying to tell us that he thinks that Gailey should be held to a higher standard?
All joking aside, I wish that people would realize, that you can be grateful for what O'leary did, appreciate what he did for the program and the state he left it in (from a talent standpoint)
and want Gailey to succeed as well. I doubt seriously any GT fan worth his salt would not be thankful that O'leary left a pretty full cupboard for the new coach to work with.
As for the team's potential, I think that we will know in the next couple of weeks. Clemson played better than I thought in the Ugag game and will be very difficult to beat at Clemson. We have the talent to win, but we must execute as well as we did against Vandy, which will be tough to do. The BYU game concerns me since they also have a high powered passing attack; to me the real unknown on our team still lies in the secondary. There are some good athletes there, but they must play more discplined than they have in recent years.
Not to be a wet blanket, but I think that 8-4 is still realistic given that we play a lot of swing games on the road and have a small number of proven players on the o-line.