Generally speaking, I would rarely say “let them score.” Yesterday, for example, I was really hoping we’d simply stop USC from scoring. But they did score and they left us plenty of time to go down field and get a score ourselves, so it all worked out in the end.
In the 1996 Minnesota game, Illinois was nursing a 21-17 lead, but the Gophers had the ball on the half inch line with under a minute to play. The odds of stopping them were long, so Tepper made, in my opinion, the right call in letting them score and leaving us 46 seconds to work with. The Gophers even made our job easier, missing the extra point so all we needed was a field goal to win instead of a TD. Alas, the strategy was not successful.