Illinois vs Southern Illinois, Saturday, September 19th, 1:00pm CT, Peacock/YTTV

#53      
fatt lacosse
aaeismacgychel said:
The thing with our schedule is that we have a ton of 50/50 games with our easiest ones on the road. Nothing that happened in these first 2 weeks really changed that. It’s not like the teams on our schedule suddenly turned into playoff teams. Is it possible we lose every single one of them? I mean anything is possible but we could say that about anything. How I see it we have a much better offense than expected and a significantly worse defense than expected. That doesn’t quite resonate as a 2 win season to me like a team with a significantly worse offense and defense would. This team is significantly better than that and we should know that- we’ve seen what 2 win teams look like. This isn’t that.

One other reason for optimism- I actually don’t think the defense has been as awful as the metrics show primarily because they’re getting absolutely nuked by some of the worst tackling I’ve seen. I would be shocked if that doesn’t improve as the season goes on. It isn’t like opposing players are just running around untouched in space with our players being incapable of getting to the ball. We’re missing tackles plain and simple.

We may not be a 10-2 team this year but we’re also not a 2-10 team
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Winnability of some of those games changed for me. UCLA is looking more like a sure loss, I was very impressed with how they closed out cal and that's west coast on the road. Nebraska has been about as expected. Michigan State took care of business against what I expect will be two middling MAC teams and I now regard them as more of a problem than I did before. Oregon looks more winnable, but we're talking moving that from 2% to 8%. Nern failed to look like a dumpster fire against a good FCS team unfortunstely.

Absolutely must see good tackling this Saturday. Must control the line of scrimmage on both sides. I'll never forget looking evenly matched in the trenches with Western Illinois in 2018. Can't be like that.
 
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