What now?

Well, look who has egg on his face again!!! I said that this was another winnable game, and here we are again on a Monday and the Gophers didn't win. Apparently my homer-bias outshines my logical nature late in the work week, but then my homer-bias is replaced by dejected reality.

Dejected reality coming...

A co-worker of mine made the observation today that even those high in spirit are subject to bouts of reality when your team takes so many losses. He's also the same co-worker who thought (and still thinks by the way) that the Gophers have another win in them. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I hope he's right.

I was pretty pumped up for Saturday night, I figured the Gophers had every reason to be excited and ready to play this game.

But the Gophers simply did NOT show up for this game. There was not a single, solitary moment of Saturday's game that I felt like the Gophers were in it. It was embarrassing.

WARNING: Meltdown coming...

Illinois came in as a one-dimensional team. They can run the ball, and that's it. Juice Williams is not a pocket-passer, he's a run-first guy. Now, I will give you, they can run the ball exceptionally well, but you knew coming in that they weren't a passing team. They were NOT going to throw. They may as well have put a full-page add in the USA Today that they weren't going to throw the ball... And yet, we couldn't stop them! They ran all over us... and around us, and pretty much any place that a team can run, they ran, and then some. They ran the ball 50 times. 50 TIMES!!! And only threw 21 times. 70% of the plays that they ran were running plays. SEVENTY!!! They came up with 448 yards rushing. They averaged 9 yards/carry. They had a 200 yard AND a 100 yard rusher. They very nearly DOUBLED our offensive production. And get this: their time of possession was less than 1 minute more than ours, they had 1 more turnover than we had AND they had almost twice as many penalty yards than we had. Illinois was absolutely BEGGING us to get back in the game. We couldn't do anything.

Once again we were not mistake-ridden by any means, we just could not do anything significant with the football, or muster up anything close to resembling a defensive stand. They punted only 1 time.

Meltdown over.

Chances are very good that I'm still going to be VERY excited for this Saturday's game against Iowa. C'mon, it's Iowa for cryin' out loud! It's Floyd, it's outdoors, it's November... IT'S COLLEGE FOOTBALL PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!

No matter what I think we can all agree on one thing...

WHO HATES IOWA?!?!?! WE HATE IOWA!!!

(There... I feel better.)