DeonThomas
- South Carolina
Ditto.A couple days removed from the game, I have to say that the energy of the crowd, the weather, and the play of the team (for 3Q at least) made for a very enjoyable afternoon. When I bought tix, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine a 40 degree rainy afternoon where we get blown out by 30+. Hell, I expected that. I want to say I couldn’t have asked for a better game but I am greedy and feel cheated out of a win.
There are so many saying “definitely targeting” and so many others saying “definitely not.” At worst, that’s a 50/50 bang bang call with zero malicious intent. For it to cost us 30 yards (not even counting the sack yardage and potential fumble recovery) plus losing our best player for the rest of this game and first half of next game for making a football play is on another level of ridiculous I can’t even fathom. It’s a short season and our best player is going to miss 3 quarters because Wisconsin could do LITERALLY NOTHING to contain him. If they called unnecessary roughness and left it at 15 yards and that was it I would probably be mad but not for days. And for those saying that we need to be able to overcome calls like that, why? We are Illinois football and need as much help as we can get. What questionable calls did the Badgers have to overcome? Ya know, since they have been head and shoulders better than us for 2+ decades and were on the road during our homecoming. Not saying any of those things should factor into us getting favorable calls but it seems to factor in for just about every other team.
We can blame the coaches and that’s fair. We can blame player execution in several plays and that’s fair too. It just felt like we we were far and away the better team on Saturday and just had about everything to wrong in the 4th (much of it our doing) and still only lost by 4 with 30 seconds to go.
In spite of that rant, what a memorable Saturday it was and I’m glad I was able to attend. Also I’m very proud of the team (players and coaches) for how they’ve responded the past two weeks after the season looked dead in the water. Yeah, wins matter, but I hope the team is taking some time to pat themselves on the back for the progress they’ve made this month. Good job, guys. Hope they can take the next step which will be consistently turning good performances into victories, and not just the moral kind.
I was also at the game in-person.
Gorgeous weather. Outstanding day for tailgating. Great friendships renewed. (Met some folks/classmates I had not seen in 20-30 years.) And it was a really, really fun and entertaining football game for 58 minutes!