Charlotte fan/alum here. Looking forward to the game for a number of reasons. Always great to get road tested against P5 teams to see how you stack up when lights are bright and pressure is high. We're off to a rollicking start, despite laying an egg on the road, in the rain, against a better-than-their-record Georgia State team.
We play a staggered tempo, fun and gun style. QB Chris Reynolds is easily the best we've had in that position in our short history. Has a decent arm, good vision, and can create. We give him option calls about 20-30% of the time. RB by committee. Camp (Bruiser), Byrd (Speedster), McEachern (Patient Cutter). Byrd and Camp are serviceable flat receivers, too.
Our strongest position group is WR. We have two candidates for Sundays, Victor Tucker and Grant Dubose. Both have big play speed and hands. Our TE Taylor Thompson is making a leap this year as a sophomore. Reminds us of Greg Olsen in build and ability to catch and immediately turn downfield in one motion. His hands and strength are developing but you cannot teach his size and determination.
In the trenches, we are just ok on both sides of the ball. Lost a lot to graduation and portal last year, but yung'ns coming along nicely. Decent size but footwork, hands, and smarts are all in the early aughts for most of them.
We rely upon our offense to put up big numbers because our defense can be pretty suspect, especially stopping the run. We get in ruts where we can't stop a nosebleed and usually, good coaches will exploit it until we sell it out, and then we start getting beat over the top on the sidelines. This was the GaSt playbook to a T and we could never quite adjust. Duke ran all over us but we were able to better pressure their QB on dropbacks and it covered a lot of weaknesses in our secondary by never allowing him to get the ball in the air. We didn't get that pressure in the backfield against GaSt or MTSU, but thankfully we could score a billion against MTSU while we really struggled to move the ball in the rain at GaSt.
Certainly do not expect we will be underestimated in this game by Illinois, especially after losing to UTSA. We fortunately avoided them and UAB from C-USA West Div this year, so a win for us this weekend would be a massive boon, not only for perception's sake to have two P5 wins in the same season, but 4-1 with 7 games to go almost assuredly has us on track for our second bowl appearance in program history.
I'll be watching from afar, but hoping for nice weather, no injuries, and an entertaining game.
The most active discussion board if you want to join us is Agent49's discord, and here is a link to the game thread:
https://discord.com/channels/619372802729967616/892064769786408970