With the extra game I would say that a lot of us thought 10 wins was the max. I went back and found our preseason poll. Almost all of us voted 10-11 wins. Bbgun was the outlier at 8-
we didn’t “fix” the safety position. We brought in Kearse who had a checkered past and was with 2 different teams last year, Kazee and Hooker who were both coming off of ACL tears.
While pretty much all of us were excited about the draft, it was assumed that brown or Lewis would be our third corner and no was thrilled about either though Brown had been serviceable as the third. We still had no proven solution on DT, coming off of a year when we had an all time bad defense. Lawrence waited until later than we would have liked to have his surgery so we knew he would be out part of the season, Gregory is/was mildly unknown, Parsons was an exciting prospect but we didn’t know his exact role and this team was still propping Jaylon Smith as a star player.
Dak was coming off his injury. While most of us liked Schultz he still needed to show more. Zeke “looked lean and refreshed” again. There were still question marks on the OL with Biadasz and Williams.
I’m not saying everything was doom and gloom but I don’t think we looked at this team as one of the top 5 ish in the NFL.