Undone

Considering that only one of those coaches on your list actually coaches a team in the B1G, I think the answer is that he'll only have to beat out one of them.

Such a great point. +1

Another one of these threads. It'd be cool to have a sub-section here for all of you "I'm stuck in 1994" people.

Are you feeling ok? Did somebody else sit down at your keyboard?

Good post, +1.

Aside from the obvious issues with certain weather factors, there are clearly a bunch of people in this thread that are conflating what they'd prefer to watch with what could actually be made to work for us. How you can't see this is beyond me.

The OP just hardly resonates with me at all. The only thing that makes sense about it even in the slightest is the cold weather seen in November in the B1G. That's about it.

Absolutely. Sometimes you just have to focus on the positives.

Awesome stats that you drew up. Across the whole of the game though, we just awful on first down in general. That was really the case against Illinois also, regardless of whether it's a nitpick of "play calling/play selection."

And really, it's our problems on 1st down that's making things so difficult. There were hardly any manageable 3rd downs to go off of. I hate saying it, but it's really on our offensive line. The answer? I'm not sure. We tried some really short out routes at times on 1st down, and Tommy was off on a lot of them. Maybe the answer is letting him keep it on QB draws on 1st down. He at least can see holes and get about five yards per attempt.

I wonder if there's been a better FB run in all of college football over the past decade or so? I mean, quite a few teams don't even keep fullbacks on the roster anymore. In any case, other than Schlesinger's pair of TDs in the '95 OB, Janovich's run is the best FB run from scrimmage that I can remember. I told a friend this morning...and it's hard to recall the moment exactly, but I think the winning '94 Orange Bowl play was actually flashing through my mind before Janovich even got in the end zone.

I just feel like forcing myself to see things with the glass half full is appropriate right now, so here's my take on that stat: They're our biggest rival. Last year our stubborn, schizophrenic "defensive genius" coach allowed them to rush for 408 yards. We embarrassed their run game, and our D-Line was dominant. We forced them to throw the ball, and they came out ahead when time expired. Is that assessment really that far off? I don't think it's "sunshine pumping."

Despite the fact that you're a little bit obnoxious with the way you deliver your message, you make some relatively good points. And you're actually probably in a fairly small minority of Husker fans, which is the funny part - You're in the crowd that actually *doesn't* have unrealistic expectations of a coach. The part that gets old though is the idea that anyone can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a coach like Tressel (or, insert your favorite candidate here) wasn't contacted at all. Yes, it's rumored that Eichorst "had his eye on" Riley for a long time, but that doesn't necessarily mean he was the only guy that was contacted. For this reason alone, I'm resigned to not get on the 'let's fire our coach' bandwagon because this situation just is what it is now. Also, it's great to have Bucky back here. Often times he makes the most reasoned posts about the state of our program in any given thread...and that's kind of a sad statement about the overarching attitudes of our fan base. And I mean that in the best possible way to you, Excel.

We're still terrible on offense on 1st down. Terrible. I felt confident that Riley was smart enough to know that if he didn't relatively commit to the run that people would have the pitchforks out. The people with the least amount of patience still have the pitchforks out, but I'd say he did commit to the run. It was two relatively incompetent offenses. In other words, a pretty typical mid-tier B1G game. But we were just so bad on 1st down, we didn't give ourselves enough steam for those inevitable last two minutes of horror in the 4th. Tommy probably needs to run more. He actually sees holes and can pick up some yards. We couldn't or wouldn't get the ball to Westerkamp. Just a terrible offensive day, again.

I just wish you still had the avatar of the chick with the huge knockers.

Seeing that run yesterday in real life was a great moment, regardless of the outcome of the last two minutes.

For sure.

And out of the ashes rises the phoenix, seaofred92.

The graph is awesome, man. Nice work! But also, really depressing...

I like your examples to a degree, but I think it's pretty fair to say that Big 10 football is a different animal than the conferences that Baylor & Oregon play in. College football is college football, but by in large I think that Big 10 football is still very defense-oriented, where games are ground down by playing field position. A lot of games go like the one we played on Saturday. Maintaining time of possession is pretty important, especially when your defense has been struggling. I really think it's more than fair to say that Mike needs to re-examine his first down approach in order to establish the run. We'll see this play out in big ways this Saturday.

MoneyBall is an epic troll account. Dude has some serious game.

"That is correct."

LOL. This discussion is getting pretty lame. The real issue was the play call. We could have taken a two yard loss on a handoff to Ozigbo, run the clock down, punted the ball into the back of the end zone, and Illinois' chances of winning the game suddenly drop to statistically close to zero. But instead, we absolutely tried to get cute, which is on Riley/Langsdorf.

No. You're missing the point so badly that it's getting kind of ridiculous. Riley should have called the timeout. And Riley/Langsdorf should have called a dive/trap/isolation handoff play. Are you actually not understanding how much better the situation would have been had Riley called a timeout with, say, 5-7 seconds left on the play clock while we were lining up for that 3rd down play and helped ensure that we got set correctly? Idiots who don't understand the game entirely notwithstanding, this is painfully easy to see. *EDIT* Not calling you an idiot, zeWilbur. Trying to say that of course there would be people who truly do not understand football getting on here after the fact complaining about this...but that there's a much, much bigger point about the way that Riley/Langsdorf managed that last series on offense.

It was running. And like somebody else said in another post, if Tommy takes the third down play from the shotgun and just runs sideways to the sidelines and slide inbounds, you take an extra five-ish seconds off the clock, let the play clock run down, use your second timeout, and have Foltz punt it to the sideline, bringing the game clock down to actually less than 15 seconds to go. It's mind-boggling that this wasn't better managed.