College Football: Illinois in rough waters and other topics

Note: most photos from yahoo.

Michigan 31 Illinois 14

How bad was this game? Judge for yourself (first half drive logs)

The score was 14-0 at the half; Yards were 231-8 after 1 quarter, 295-19 at the half.
Or I’ll put it another way: Michigan broke a 68 yard off tackle run on the second play from scrimmage; that was more than triple the yards that Illinois was to get in the entire first half.

There was still some hope after the first half; Illinois did stuff Michigan on 4′th and inches at the goal and Michigan missed a short field goal (very windy day).

The teams traded fumbles:

But the stadium was dead, dead, dead.

The third quarter saw Michigan pull out to 17-0, but then Illinois went to a “hurry up” tempo and then appeared to block better. A nice long drive saw Illinois cut it to 17-7.

Then the defense got a stop and Illinois started to drive! But with 11:50 to go in the game, UM intercepted a pass and ran it down to the Illinois 22. The fans started to leave right then! 10 points down…11:50 to go, and many of the fans gave up!

Eventually Michigan punched it in to push it to 24-7.

Still, Illinois drove it 80 yards to pull to 24-14 with just over 3 minutes to play. Then Illinois tries an onside; Michigan recovers and then scores on a run to push it to 31-14 and put the game away.

My analysis
True, the offense has yet to score a first half point in any of their previous 4 games. The totals have been 7, 14, 7 and 14 points. The offense looked good three times: against I-AA (ok, FCS) South Dakota State and against Northwestern (67′th on defense, gives up 29.1 points per game) and Indiana (110′th in defense, 37.7 points per game). They looked ok against Arkansas State (Sun Belt first game with a new coach) and Western Michigan (89′th in defense, gives up 32.1 points per game).

They struggled against Ohio State, Purdue, Penn State and Michigan. The Arizona State game was the team’s best win, but that was lead by the defense.

To me this means: it is the competition.

The offensive line: is struggling. They don’t give the quarterbacks time to throw and they don’t open holes…at least they didn’t until Illinois went to a “hurry up”. I wonder if this is the result of a bad blocking scheme, a lack of execution of the scheme (inexperience?) or the athletes getting overwhelmed. I don’t know enough to draw an accurate conclusion; I do know that there aren’t many holes and that both Illini quarterbacks are under constant pressure.

ND-Maryland

I listened to much of this game on the drive back and saw some at the end.

Maryland is not playing especially well at the moment but this was still a nice win for the Irish. Note: the Irish have gone to weird helmets, rock music and are pushing for more things. This is probably a step in the right direction.

Yeah, I heard about “tradition” but let’s face it: what is now tradition was an innovation at one time. And let’s remember that Knute Rockney was a great innovator; in fact he probably would have lead the way with these reforms.

SMU-Navy
(photos from here)

Navy got out to a 24-10 lead and held on to beat SMU 24-17. Remember that the Ponies beat TCU earlier this year; this was a nice win for Navy. President Bush attended this game.

UT-Missouri
UT didn’t have a good offensive performance and only scored 5 points against a mediocre Missouri team. Texas can gash a bad defense though.