Illinois Hokie's Recent Comments

So it really comes down to this: are you a member of the Hokie Club? If the answer is no, you aren't contributing toward your stated goal of a national championship. We have a lot of ground to cover if we want to become a playoff program, and all that ground is littered with dollar signs. It's not enough to have the right coaching staff, and have to have a competitive budget, and we don't.

One thing this season has taught me, we will bitch about literally any start time. It's right up there with uniforms.

Given his stats, I think it's safe to say the staff has absolutely crafted the offense around Willis's game. Third best QBR in the conference behind Ryan Finley and Trevor Lawrence, and he's gone from a 0.71/1 TD to INT ratio at Kansas to a 4/1 ratio here. Given your three points above:

1. It's only poor planning/recruiting to give him backup snaps if there's a better option somewhere on the roster. I think you're underselling how bad the QB situation was when Fuente arrived. Willis was accepted as a walk-on as an emergency option. Supplanting Hooker as the backup is more a testament to Willis than an indictment of the coaches.

2. When the zone read is eliminated, the rest of the run game suffers. That's really frustrating, since Willis actually has the physical tools to contribute to the run game, if he could just consistently make the right read, which brings us to...

3. The coaches cannot make the QB make the right reads. At some point it either clicks for a player or it doesn't. After six games for Willis, I'm leaning toward doesn't. He's being put in a position that plays to his strengths, but taking the next step in development is on Willis, not the coaches.

There are plenty of fans who would take the former, but Fuente will always take the latter.

You realize any OC has to make the opposing defense respect the run in order to keep the passing game open, right? We were slinging the ball all over BC. They dropped two safeties into coverage and the passing game evaporated. But our run game is hamstrung by the fact that Willis still can't make the right read, so the zone read, a bread and butter play for this offense, is essentially out of the playbook.

You give Willis 50 attempts per game, he'll keep slinging it even if the opposing defense drops nine into coverage. And there's a good chance he'll target a receiver that's triple covered. Like it or hate it, Fuente is as turnover-averse as Beamer was. Maybe even more. There's a reason Willis is averaging one interception per 59.5 attempts this season, after averaging one every 25.4 attempts at Kansas, and it's all because of how Fuente and Corn are managing him. They're putting him in a position to be successful, playing to his strengths and mitigating his weakness. But he's taken the zone read off the table, and we just don't have the running game we need to compliment him.

I'll say this: to my eye, Cornelson has been a lot more successful limiting the mistakes of a mistake-prone player in Willis than Bud has done with Caleb Farley and Reggie Floyd this year.

Maybe blocking? I dunno. That one doesn't make sense to me either.

Out of all the poor play we've seen on defense, that if Floyd has to be the most disappointing, if only because he was called on to be the experienced anchor of this squad.

We could always use a great O lineman like Teller, but this will not be a year I look back upon and think, if we only had a better offensive line.

This is an odd sentiment to me. Not the "Fire Cornelson" part (though I'm not onboard that particular train yet). What I mean is we brought in Fuente because of his reputation on offense. If we were to terminate Cornelson, I have always just assumed the logical next step is Fuente taking over playcalling duties again for a while until he grooms a replacement OC in his system.

True, but this defense is giving up almost a full touchdown more per game through its first nine games than the 2015 defense did. (31.0 ppg vs 24.3 ppg)

how these young players respond will be a clear indicator if the defense, with all this youth, has a bright future, or if this is a harbinger of continued defensive struggles next season.

This needs to be addressed. Anyone expecting/hoping for a return to form for the defense next season needs to seriously reconsider their perspective. This is not just an issue of getting this defense more experience. There are starters on this defense who have shown no indication of playing well in Bud's scheme. We might well have more busts on the field this season than future contributors. Beyond that, some recruiting failures have left us so thin at key positions that there is no fix in sight. I seriously do not know what we are doing to do at DT after Walker and Mihota leave. If we don't land some JUCO or graduate transfers just to get some bodies in the weight room at the position, Bud might be forced to run a 30 front out of necessity.

Here's the problem I have with that. In three recruiting classes, Fuente and his offensive staff have reloaded at WR, OL and QB. Say whatever else you want about the offense, the coaches identified our positions of need and attacked on the recruiting trail to fill the cupboards. Why didn't the same thing happen at DL, when we have the same coaches coaching our front seven? Fuente had immediate recruiting success as the new guy. Why couldn't Foster and Wiles do the same as proven veteran coaches?

Our defense will be bad for at least another season, and probably for as long as we fail to recruit as we should along the DL. Anyone expecting to see a sudden turnaround is setting themselves up for disappointment.

That's true, but if we're going to throw out garbage time scores for us, we have to throw them out for everyone.