I listened to the post game show on my drive back home after the game and some of the calls were pretty ridiculous. A lot the callers are critical of Lovie's demeanor. They want him to yell and scream at the players as opposed to his stoic approach, which I don't necessarily agree with. You can see that players, especially the upper classmen, are given very short leashes and can have their playing time reduced to nothing rather quickly. One guy wanted us to fill the roster with Central Illinois kids who have "heart"? Another woman called in and said the Green punt return debacle happened because the ball hit an Illinois' player's leg
I didn't see that at all. Another caller was questioning why we didn't go for two when it was 28-16? I felt like screaming at the radio at that point and turned the show off. Does that person not understand that the downside to being down 12 points is MUCH BIGGER than the potential upside of being down 10 points?
This was a tough loss and there is no way around that. Rutgers came into the game with a 16 game conference losing streak, was averaging 11 PPG against FBS schools and started their 3rd string QB. They went on to score 35 points while our offense struggled to score points until late in the game.
Reading some of Lovie's comments at today's press conference add some clarity to what I saw on Saturday, however. I didn't realize that Watson, Phillips and Jones are all dealing with injuries. I was confused as to why we were seeing such a big shakeup with the LBs when a guy like Phillips was the 2nd leading tackler in the conference entering the game on Saturday. Watson and Jones have also been pretty solid against the run. If there are injuries, however, then they really have no choice but to go to the next guy on the depth chart. Not having Nelson out there also hurt a lot.
I can also understand why Corbin's playing time was limited due to a really costly penalty. That makes sense to me as that can be a learning experience for him. A lot of us are sick of the costly penalties.
Those who feel that some of us are Lovie apologists need to understand that we don't like the losing anymore than you do. However, you can't ignore the fact that there are only 76 scholarship players and 22 upperclassmen on this roster. We aren't bending over backwards to defend this staff. If they can't get this turned around by 2019 they should be gone.
Whether you are happy with this staff or not, they are building this program up the right way as opposed to handing out scholarships to JUCO players who may or may not help us right away. I'm not trying to be rude, but there are a number of JUCO players on this team (Phillips is not one of them) who are not B1G players.
If Lovie is not the answer then they are setting up the next staff with a nice foundation of players who will at least have experience and who appear to be pretty talented. They have at least done a good job of identifying talent.
For those of you who want us to be angrier, I don't know what to tell you? Attendance is very poor so it's not like they (Whitman and the coaches) aren't aware that the product on the field is not good enough for this fan base. If you want to put coaches on the chopping block after 20 months, who would want to come and coach here? Recruiting kids to come to this program is a tough sell right now given where this program is at and how lacking our facilities are. The instate kids are mostly ABI and we have to establish pipelines out of state in order to get Power 5 players to come here. Guys like Ward and Hayes-Stoker are doing that. Hopefully Nickerson can use his California connections to get more gems like Bennett Williams.
