Undone

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.

"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?