This was a despicable outing and I don't know how anyone could not have serious concerns about the future under the leadership of this staff.
I've been pondering Saturday's game for some time and I think I can put it in words now. I don't agree with the serious concerns, or I don't think I do. Here's the way I'm thinking about it.
The defense and the offense both suffer from similar things. The defensive scheme isn't atrocious per se. It's worked for us. The thing is, look at the Illini defense before say Vic K. gets here. We're abysmal. We're short on talent, our scheme was terrible, we were rated what like 80... geez maybe bottom 100 in the nation. Super Vic K gets here and he revamps the D completely. He knows we don't have the best kids in the nation so he does what he can to make the most of his talent pool and he does what he can to help them make plays. He really schemed in a way that wasn't super complicated so the kids could wrap their heads around it and do well AND he obfuscated what he wanted to do to make it more difficult for the offense to react to us. He disguised and disguised and disguised. The other things Vic K did was to NOT sit back and let their offense dictate what our defense was going to look like. That D got aggressive and dictated our terms to the opposing team. First we jumped like to top 40 and second year we were what... top ten, top twenty? I mention that to compare our current schemes to.
So let's compare that to our schemes now. The biggest problem I think is that our defense is so easy to figure out. You put a man in motion and get a quick look - are we in zone or are we in man. Do you want to run or pass? Answer those two questions and you have your play and should know your likelihood to complete the play. Done.
Offense is pretty much the same way. Do we look pass or run? Load the box, spy the QB and make us beat you down field.
Given we're pretty easy to ID and predict that REALLY makes the job we're asking the kids to do that much more difficult. They know exactly where to attack and they're better at attacking than we are at running our scheme. On top of that we're seeing kids out of position constantly. I mean, kids missing assignments that result in big gains. Who watches Illinois Football Breakdown on YouTube? That guy does a great job. SHOUT OUT TO THAT GUY!
We gotta find a way to make it easier on the kids. We're just killing ourselves out there. I'm probably wrong, but we don't have the depth, the five stars, the veterans to play a bend but don't break defense that reacts to what their O gives us and consistently win. We make it too easy on them and too tuff on us.
I'm afraid the offensive side of things is similar. I was hoping we'd play Rivers and get a passing game going on a Purdue team that would be keying in our run game. We came at them in the same old way and they beat us... in the same old way.
Pro's - we're going to be better, we should have a little more depth, and we should have more experience with players that are a year older.
Con's - we won't really look that different, we're going to be playing the same people in the same system with little in the way of surprises.
If we're 20% better next year does that really translate into success? I don't think the answer is a revolving door at coach, but we need to find an answer and they need to figure out soon. Like we need to figure it out in the next three weeks. I'm not incredibly down after the loss, but I'm not really optimistic at this point either. If we don't make some changes how can we POSSIBLY ever get any pressure on a QB?