CHAMPAIGN — For the first time in two months, the Illini enter game week coming off of a loss.
Michigan State on Saturday snapped No. 16/21 Illinois’ six-game winning streak with a 23-15 win at Memorial Stadium. The Illini offense once again moved the ball well between the 20s but stalled out in the red zone and on third- and fourth-down opportunities.
Illinois (7-2, 4-2) has 441 yards of total offense with 153 coming on the ground and 288 coming through the air with just one turnover, a fumble by Chase Brown. But the Illini were 1-of-4 on red-zone touchdowns and a combined 7-of-23 on third- and fourth-down conversions.
The Illini host Purdue (5-4, 3-3) at 11 a.m. Saturday (ESPN2) in a critical race for the Big Ten West championship.
Here’s what offensive coordinator Barry Lunney Jr. said during his weekly press conference in the press box on the eighth floor at Memorial Stadium.
What is going wrong in those short-yardage conversions and what do you need to clean up?
Lunney: “Obviously to start off the first series of the game when we got down inside of there there were four play calls at first and goal. Two of the four we just didn’t execute. The other two calls you could argue they had a better defense than maybe what I had called. The opportunities to get in, didn’t take advantage of it through execution. The other situations we had a fourth-and-1 or fourth-and-2, both of those we came up short on. Sometimes it’s a combination of you saying, ‘Man, I wish I had this call over.’ Obviously you vet all those things over the course of the week, you plan and go through them and say, ‘Here’s what you anticipate.’ They don’t always unfold exactly the way you think they’re going to unfold as far as what you see from a front standpoint or a coverage but those play calls have, I don’t know if answers, but opportunities for us to be successful despite what they play. There’s a balance there between, ‘Man, I’d like to call that one over again,’ or, ‘We’ve got to execute better.’ Regardless, whatever it is, we tell the players all the time whether it’s execution or play call, the bottom line is we — we— are not getting it done and didn’t get it done on Saturday. That falls squarely on me. We’ve got to be better in those situations.”
