Northwestern has never been good on defense. Just opportunistic. They wouldn't have beat us in 2011 had Rex not fumbled inside the five or Quincy fumbled on the 20.
We showed some improvement, but still got gashed on the run. I think Mark is a better back than Ferguson. Time will tell, but we really have no idea how good Illinois is at this point.
The wild card is we don't know how good we can be either. Pursuit angles were my biggest concern today and they need to be fixed. But we had some new guys step up today. We are so young it's stupid.
We did show real improvement, but on the other side of the coin Illinois straight-up played like sh#t. They couldn't even move the ball when we literally didn't have a defense set up on the field.
