[Oskee] Juice benched

[Todd Sweet]

Basketball practice officially starts on October 16, Robert.so chin up, my
friend.

 

Listen, I'm a die hard fan.  There's nothing I want more than to see our
teams succeed.  But watching Juice over the past few years I've made a few
observations:

 

-          a great deal of his completed passes are short passes that any
quarterback at D1 should complete nearly 100% of.

-          When he does complete passes, it's frequently just far enough off
the mark that the receivers almost never catch the ball with forward
momentum, let alone in stride.

-          He locks in on a target and it seems like once he does, the other
receivers don't matter (and as a result misses a lot of open ones)

 

I give Juice tons of credit for being a tough, tough runner.  He's great at
the deceptive handoff and he's hard to bring down.  But that just isn't
enough.  A 4th year starter should be showing major improvement and Juice
just doesn't look all that different from year to year.  Given the beat
downs we've taken this year, I agree with the change (though I'm not
convinced that Eddie will do much better).

 

I went to the spring game with a friend.  We both saw a lot of these
problems coming this year, although not to this extreme.  I think the thing
that has become most glaring to me this year is that we seem to have pretty
decent athletes, but not many of them seem to be improving on a year to year
or game to game basis.  That, my friends, is a coaching issue.plain and
simple.  If you look back at our Rose Bowl run, there's are two things
missing that we don't have.  Everyone knows about Mendenhall, but everyone
seems to forget about Vince Okruch.  His defensive schemes really locked
down some good teams that year, and it's been all downhill on defense ever
since he left.

 

I'm always pulling for our team, but where football is concerned, I've
learned to keep my optimism fairly guarded.  The truth is, even with a win
this Saturday (which I frankly don't see), this team is not likely to make a
bowl game.  If that's the case, you have a coach who has had losing seasons
4 out of 5 years.and that's just not acceptable.  

 

Todd S.

 

 

 

  _____  

From: oskee-bounces at heins.net [mailto:oskee-bounces at heins.net] On Behalf Of
Robert Mingee
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 4:31 PM
To: oskee at heins.net
Subject: [Oskee] Juice benched

 

I'm sure you've all seen the story by now that Juice has been benched
(though curiously it is not reported on fightingillini.com).  Opinions?
Personally, I don't see how you can possibly pin the losses on him entirely,
but as the team leader, he's ultimately responsible, and I can't really
blame Zook for wanting to shake things up.  As with last year, consistency
continues to be his biggest problem -- he's either really on or really off.
I was really shocked to read how bad his stats are, though -- it didn't seem
that bad from watching.

>From a purely pragmatic perspective, this season is over before it even
really started -- I don't see any way for this team to make a bowl.  Yes,
they have faced tough competition, but it's not really going to get much
easier, and I just don't see any spark on this team.  It's like they're
going through the motions.  There just doesn't seem to be any hope of them
beating a team that's better than they are, because they are so lacking in
intangibles.  The defense can be exciting at times, but it's so
inexperienced.  And the offense continues to be so much less than the sum of
its parts, for whatever reason.  So I guess there's really nothing much to
lose, except further demoralizing Juice, which really is regrettable.  He
seems like a decent kid, and he's done some amazing work in his career, but
he's just not getting it done.  If there's any hope for next year, it's
getting Eddie some solid experience in this offense.

Sigh.  When does basketball season start again?

-- robert

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