As much as I want to believe improvement from the O-line would produce better results from the offense, the defense still has a lot to fix from last year if this team wants to go bowling. There should be more alarm bells about the D considering how statistically awful they were last year. Even though they weren't much worse than the 2021 defense in terms of PPG, the 2021 defense was actually respectable the first half of the year. MSU was held to 13 not including a pick six, PSU was held to 24 (with 0 help from the offense I might add), and Iowa was held to 20 not including the two pick sixes.
Last year, the defense was terrible for 10 of our 12 games. Imo they were solid against IL and they were strong for one half against PU and Michigan. I read the IUFB NBC Sports Betting preview, and while the article contained mostly bottom tier football analysis from a national writer, he did list some eye opening PFF stats from last year's team. The defense ranked 113th nationally in 3 & out generation, 116th in big play rate, and 123rd in net passing yards per attempt. I should note they were 33rd nationally according to PFF in run defense success rate, so it wasn't all bad. But the pass defense was just terrible last year. Idk what happened to the back end of our defense, but the results were simply not even close to where they should be considering nearly every member of the secondary from last year was a multi year starter coming into the season.
Personally, I judge HC's harsher on the results of their team on the side of the ball the HC has a background in. When I look at last year's results, CTA had a veteran defense, he was in his 7th season as Indiana's HC so they were all "his guys" and Indiana still had the worst defense in the conference in terms of PPG and passing yards per game. It just doesn't fill me with a ton of confidence. So while the spotlight will deservingly be on the O-line for the 3rd season in a row, it's important to note the deteriorating results outside of just the O-line position because the O-line was far from the only problem we had last season.