It was the longest football season in McNeese State history.

Not only was the record the worst ever, but just about everything that could have gone wrong did.

The only normal thing was the Cowboys still led the Southland Conference in attendance, a factor that won’t last forever if McNeese can’t turn things around.

When a team loses every game it played on the field there is not just one thing that went wrong. McNeese has major work to do this offseason and begin the long climb back to the top of the Football Championship Subdivision level. Here are five areas needing the most improvement:

Weight Room

If anything was learned this year it was that the Cowboys need to get bigger and stronger.

They are young, for sure, so that might take care of some things but not all. The program needs to have a full offseason of strength work to help make up for still being young next season.

McNeese was often either run over or not able to power its own offense, especially in the second half of games. It also led to 26 sacks of McNeese quarterbacks compared to nine the defense could muster.

D-line depth

Not only does this group need to get better but more beef needs to be added.

More than anything this line was overmatched both in numbers and size. You can’t really get help with this group by way of high school recruits either. It will be important for the coaches to work the NCAA transfer portal to find some hidden gems for these spots.

That is also the problem. The hardest positions to recruit in the portal for FCS schools are the offensive and defensive lines. Anybody with even practice value gets eaten up by the big schools.

Re-recruit room

The Cowboys are destined to lose some players but keeping the key members of the club is important.

You can’t start over every year, and there is some solid young talent on the roster. Losing key players would signal another year of playing too many inexperienced folks, and that can’t happen again.

This won’t be easy for players who these days are always looking for their next big opportunity and there is always NIL money drawing them to larger programs.

It will be up to some of the guys who are willing to stay to set the tone for the rest to want to be at McNeese. It might be more important that the players buy into the rebuild as much as the coaches.

Turn the Page

Far too often it looked like the players were waiting for something bad to happen.

There were more than a few times McNeese took leads into the second half of games or had chances to win. But there was also the feeling that they were expecting something bad to happen, and often it did.

The Cowboys were far too often unable to stop things when they started to go against them. This led to frustration and ultimately defeat. With the lack of big plays, it was hard to change things back as they began to go bad.

Turnovers

This is on both sides of the ball. McNeese had far too many turnovers and created not nearly enough.

The Cowboys committed 22 turnovers and forced 11. Half of McNeese’s turnovers were interceptions, which was the same number of touchdown passes the Cowboys threw. Their opponents’ margin was 17-5.

Giving up that many possessions put McNeese in a position to have to overcome those mistakes far too often.

A young, overmatched team had little room for error and McNeese was never able to do that.