Minnesota 25, Illinois 17 Postgame

NASchamp said:

I don’t know. Anytime you pick someone up who is already going down and flip them onto their head/neck, you are intending to do something more than tackle them….

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Except that's not what happened. He wasn't picked up and he wasn't already going down. Luke was fighting through the contact and one of the defenders took out his legs, which is what he's supposed to do.

I think it's notable that our coach specifically singed out the refs after this game, with specific examples, and as far as I am aware did not mention this play. If what you claim happened actually happened, this would be Exhibit A in any complaint about the refs. Instead he talked about the targeting call against Scott and uncalled the late hit against Luke.

But if you want to explain what penalty the refs should have called, and cite to the language in the rule book that supports the penalty, I am always open to changing my opinion.

the juiceman cometh said:

Except that's not what happened. He wasn't picked up and he wasn't already going down. Luke was fighting through the contact and one of the defenders took out his legs, which is what he's supposed to do.

I think it's notable that our coach specifically singed out the refs after this game, with specific examples, and as far as I am aware did not mention this play. If what you claim happened actually happened, this would be Exhibit A in any complaint about the refs. Instead he talked about the targeting call against Scott and uncalled the late hit against Luke.

But if you want to explain what penalty the refs should have called, and cite to the language in the rule book that supports the penalty, I am always open to changing my opinion.

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Yeah, the only call (or lack thereof) that ticked me off was the blown delay of game that they initially charged a timeout to Illinois, and subsequently returned the timeout. It was a very messed up sequence that should have pushed Minnesota back 5 yards.

I'm in the clear minority here but I don't place a lot of blame on play calling. In fact, play calling hasn't lost us a single game. Are we kind of predictable? Yeah, but that's more of a symptom than a root cause. IMO, it starts with the line. We're just so limited in what we can do. But we have to at least try to play complementary football.

I've seen some people suggest that we should pass to open up the run. Well what if I told you we already do that? Against Minnesota we ran 28 first down plays. Only 7 of them were hand offs.

Without a good line, we're going to continue to fall behind the sticks regardless of the plays called. That's just football.

21ChampaignSt said:

I've seen some people suggest that we should pass to open up the run. Well what if I told you we already do that? Against Minnesota we ran 28 first down plays. Only 7 of them were hand offs.

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That's largely a function of being behind for a good chunk of the game.

In the first half we ran 6 1st down run plays (including a Luke keeper on an option that you didn't include because it's not a "hand off").

That being said my main problem with the play calling was 3rd down, not 1st. That 3rd-and-2 where we ran McCray for a loss was particularly bad. Everyone knew what we were going to do and we knew they knew, and we did it anyway.

the juiceman cometh said:

That's largely a function of being behind for a good chunk of the game.

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I don't agree with that. We were down one score at most the entire game. You are not changing your offense a lot because of being behind by one score.

The greater likelihood is because the hand-off was not working and wrre trying something different.

the juiceman cometh said:

That's largely a function of being behind for a good chunk of the game.

In the first half we ran 6 1st down run plays (including a Luke keeper on an option that you didn't include because it's not a "hand off").

That being said my main problem with the play calling was 3rd down, not 1st. That 3rd-and-2 where we ran McCray for a loss was particularly bad. Everyone knew what we were going to do and we knew they knew, and we did it anyway.

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But also EVERY team runs plenty of straight handoffs every game. It's not like we are doing something old fashioned that nobody else does. Really a lot of the time the blocking isn't even that terrible but our RBs have not done a good job of finding holes. It's get the ball and just plow straight ahead into the back of the line. Think about how Chase Brown was effective, he always talked about being patient, waiting for blocks to develop, finding seams. Go watch the best RBs out there and they arent just blasting full speed ahead after the handoff. How often have you seen our RBs cut back, bounce a run outside, or really do anything other than go straight ahead. McCray is getting better YPC because he can actually read his blocks and find some of those seams, Laughery and at this point Valentine just don't have it.

Illini2010-11 said:

I don't agree with that. We were down one score at most the entire game. You are not changing your offense a lot because of being behind by one score.

The greater likelihood is because the hand-off was not working and wrre trying something different.

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I mean, of the 1st down pass plays we ran something like 6 of them were in the last drive of the 1st half (less than 2 minutes) and the last two drives of the 2nd half (3 minutes and under and needing a TD). That's a pretty significant chunk of our 1st down plays where it's just situationally heavily weighted towards a pass play. When the situation is more neutral, we absolutely do tend to run more often on 1st down, which is fine btw, so long as we're finding ways to make it work (which it did not in this game).

blackdog said:

But also EVERY team runs plenty of straight handoffs every game. It's not like we are doing something old fashioned that nobody else does. Really a lot of the time the blocking isn't even that terrible but our RBs have not done a good job of finding holes. It's get the ball and just plow straight ahead into the back of the line. Think about how Chase Brown was effective, he always talked about being patient, waiting for blocks to develop, finding seams. Go watch the best RBs out there and they arent just blasting full speed ahead after the handoff. How often have you seen our RBs cut back, bounce a run outside, or really do anything other than go straight ahead. McCray is getting better YPC because he can actually read his blocks and find some of those seams, Laughery and at this point Valentine just don't have it.

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Which again is why I'm more critical of our 3rd down play calling than 1st down. I just think the added context is necessary as we ran a much higher percentage of our first down plays in the beginning of the game.

And yeah, our personnel is not ideal at RB right now. Really missing Feagin, and think we need to adjust our game plan a bit to match the personnel we do have.