Improved as expected, or beyond what was expected:
OL, DL, LBs, DBs

A road win is always good news.

Beat the spread both times so far.

But, we thought we had taken our lumps last year with the offensive backfield when we endured lots of RB injuries and inconsistent QB play with more turnovers than expected. Presumably, the WR/TE situation is a strength, but it is dependent on the offensive backfield to see.

So, now that it seems like we're watching a bummer movie that we've seen before, it's deflating.

In a conference without any runaway great teams, and strength across the rest of the team, being just at or above average in the offensive backfield would put us towards the top of the conference.

We had some reason to think we had that, but now have clearer reasons to doubt that. No cloud 9.