On the next 5 game stretch … I'll predict a 3W-1L-1T haul. I'd like to see them do better, sure. I just don't think they're good enough on a consistent basis to do better than that. But it would set them up with 10 wins by the time they return to the heart of the league schedule. Let's not forget … it was only two seasons ago when UNH faced a similar stretch after a decent start to the final year of Coach Umile's Long Goodbye Tour, where many of us were banking on another solid haul of W's as a springboard to the successful conclusion of The Quest for the NRN. "Didn't quite work out the way we hoped" would be an understatement.
Like Dan, and as stated in the title of the offseason thread, I'm still not sold on just how much progress has been made in the still-unfolding MS7 Era. Coming from where the program was during the 2018 calendar year, and several seasons before that, it was always unlikely to change overnight, and the progress we've seen to date has been of the small, steady steps … the learn to walk before you can run version of digging out from the deep hole we all experienced two seasons ago. That's probably good enough, as long as the progress continues on a year-to-year basis, and a winning system and mindset are developed. But the tricky part can be what to do when some of your top talent invariably/inevitably moves on, and whether you can reload or just rebuild. So many programs get stuck in the latter scenario, where they have a few top players, no quality depth, and when the top players do move on, the replacements aren't up to the same standards - or there just aren't enough quality players to keep things pointing forwards. Heck, there were some lulls during the UNH glory years too … but it always seemed closer to reloading than rebuilding, until eventually it wasn't. The program lost that forward momentum, things got a little stale, and here we are now, looking back.
FWIW … it took Coach Madigan some time to get things moving at Northeastern, but he's there now with perennially talented and entertaining teams. Hopefully that's the trajectory we'll see with MS7 in Durham. 2019 has been a good year, and hopefully we'll look back in a year's time and say 2020 was even better. Build like that for a few more seasons, and things could start getting pretty exciting around here again. Whether we're on the right track or not probably has more to do with the games that follow these next five. JMHO.