Undone

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.

"It's a great mental test for everybody," Riley said. Yes - it's a great mental test for you to try to run the ball on first down, and at least just see what happens.

That's just beyond depressing.

rofl

wtf are you even saying? I've never used the 'ignore' function on this forum, but you're probably a good candidate. You basically made up your point out of something that isn't there.

I mean, it does make sense to an extent. If it's truly a designed bootleg keeper, you probably want your guys running routes (except for your I-Back) in order to draw the secondary down field so your QB can make a play in space with his legs. But obviously, the point is that it was a bad play call. Hand the damn ball off to either Ozigbo or Janovich.

I think this is a reasonable point, good post. I also think there's a difference between the approach across the whole of the game, and what happened on our last series on offense. And probably way too many fans are combining the two. If we just hand the damn ball off on both 3rd and then punt on 4th, the percentage of Illinois' likelihood of winning the game drops to an incredibly low level. But it also seems obvious that we completely sucked on first down over the course of the entire game. In hindsight, we should have ran on first down, basically every first down. But you make a good point - that doesn't necessarily translate into "Riley doesn't understand the importance of running." I think that'll be determined in more detail this Saturday. Saturday is a pivotal game.

That's good to see, at least. Doesn't really mean that much at this point, but it's good to see. My only thought on Saturday night regarding this was basically just to lie to myself and say, "Maybe Riley really *is* planning to run against Wisconsin, and didn't want to show off his game plan to them against Illinois and just assumed that it would be a good time to try to work on Tommy's deep looks." Seems incredibly unlikely. And it's incredibly depressing.

This is a terrible post. GTFO with this stuff.

I don't know if that is the case in all scenarios, against Illinois on Saturday that was the case. When the weather is like that and you aren't throwing that well, the game plan needs to change. Agree with you both. I honestly believe that if Riley doesn't feature the run (and even more specifically, feature Ozigbo in the run) this Saturday that this will probably be the fastest "we hate our coach" campaign by the fan base at large that we've ever seen in the modern era. Would he deserve that? I don't know. Maybe not. My main question is, are we inventing this whole "Riley says that passing the ball is the hill he's going to die on" thing, or not? If that's really the guy he is, how does he really think he's going to fare in the Big 10?

This is a good thread, and a good OP by True. I agree with your thinking and the confusion of what's happening both with the running game and with our RB situation. A 'glass half full' response might be that even the fact that Ozigbo was featured at all shows that this staff isn't actually *completely clueless* in the run game. I'm somewhat hopeful in that respect. Maybe I'm way off here, but this is where I'm at - I have a much bigger problem with our coaches' approach to our first down presence than anything else. Way, waaaaaaaay too many lobs down the field (as Chatelain said, "like a grade schooler playing '500') on first down. Run the damn ball on first down, and set yourself up to *at least* play field position on the other team. That's Big 10 football - it's undeniable. We're going to fail miserably down the stretch if Riley fails to see this.

Agreed. That basically sums it up. Our defensive line was great. Like, really great. Collins was a force. There was a lot of rotation, lots of guys played, and almost all of them played well. I feel like we did more at linebacker, and had good help when we needed it to cut off running angles on the edge of the field. Defensively, it was a good day for us. Ozigbo finishes runs and hits holes with intensity. Those two things define him as worlds apart from Newby. The fullback 'trap' type play was again decent. Janovich's overall play is good. But Westerkamp's drop that would have put us in a position to either score on that play or at least get a field goal was so depressing. And the inability to convert one last first down to ice the game, which was practically exactly the same situation as BYU, was just unbelievable. So unbelievable, that it surely points to systemic problems this coaching staff has with both coaching the run, and their run philosophy in general. Illinois shouldn't have gotten the ball back, and BYU shouldn't have gotten the ball back. I think our coaches could potentially review the use of Ozigbo and create an altered game plan for Wisconsin...but I have very little faith in this.

This game was so incredibly painful. Dirty Dick nails it, obviously. Our offense had no direction or trajectory the entire damn game. Unbelievable.

It's unbelievable to think that they also missed both field goals, and we still let them stay in the game. It's so hard to lose this one, because our defensive line gave such a great effort today. Westerkamp had a TD reception in his hands and let it slip out. But our offensive effort, game plan, and execution was just about as bad as it's ever been.

F*** that f****** last series. It was BYU all over again. Our complete inability to ice the game by converting the first down on the ground is f******* awful.