First off, congratulations to Bowling Green. They outplayed us, outcoached us and are a very deserving champion. Well done, please win your bowl game.

Second, thanks to our players, coaches and staff for a terrific season. It didn't end the way we hoped but was an exciting ride and great fun while it lasted. I've rarely had more fun watching the Huskies than this season. It hurts to lose but most teams would trade places with us in a heartbeat, don't forget that.

Other thoughts:

-Bowling Green's O and D lines dominated this game from start to finish. Just a great performance by those units and of course everything starts from there. Some of that is getting your guys ready to play and I guess ours weren't.

-Bowling Green's QB was also fantastic tonight. He had all day to throw but still. And the few times we got pressure he usually squirted out of there for positive yardage. A great, clutch performance. Their running back is really good too. He kind of glides around out there and always picks up positive yardage, very hard to tackle.

-Our missing offensive skill guys finally caught up with us. We got away with it against lesser competition but not tonight. I dare say DaRon Brown, Deucee Turner, Sebastiano, Keith Harris and Akeem Daniels would have helped. Tommylee doesn't look 100% either. Everyone likes to harp on DaRon for his occasional drops but his absence was the biggest impact tonight. Without him we basically couldn't run our offense. When DaRon and Tommylee are playing and 100% we work the perimeter hard with them with bubble screens and jet sweeps, which then opens the middle for Lynch. We worked everyone outside in all season. With Brown missing they were able to double Tommylee and not worry about the other guys, thus allowing the middle to focus on stopping Lynch. We ran no semblance of our offense tonight because we didnt' have the players. You know its bad when Lynch is trying to force the ball to Matt Williams and Chad Beebe in the championship game. I thought they coulda/shoulda used Spencer more but it was going to be tough anyway. This game made Lynch look bad but it was not his fault.

-Re the missing offensive guys, we can't whine too much because no one's had better luck than us the last two years but it is tough when it fundamentally changes your offense. Would like to have another crack at it with those guys present but of course you only get one shot.

-Nice game by Mat Sims, he killed those long field goals.

-Our defense, what the hell? On a night when our offense was shorthanded our D needed to step up and were nowhere to be found. No QB pressure, bad tackling and worse coverage. How many completely blown coverages were there? That was embarrassing. I was having flashbacks to the Novak years when every play against Toledo was a jailbreak. Bowling green completely, utterly outschemed us tonight and as I said, the tackling was awful too. Just an F minus by the defense. Imagine what OK State would have done to us, I guess we dodged a bullet there.

-It didn't really impact the game but the officials repeatedly missed the spot by a yard or more, sometimes two yards. Really bad. It went both ways but just a terrible job by the officials there.

-For those of you who may have missed it, after halftime they mentioned that the correct call on the onside kick should have been a 15 yard penalty against us. When the ball is kicked directly into the ground and takes a big hop the receiving team gets an opportunity to field it before being hit. So the officials got that sort of right although for the wrong reason.

A few other points I thought of:

-Back in the offseason there was a discussion on this board of possible contenders from the East division. I said that Bowling Green would be good and could possibly be great if they got better QB play. Boy did that turn out to be true. Their current QB is head and shoulders above the guy they had last year.

-Could Clawson have had a better night for his resume? Not only did he complete the rebuilding job by winning BGs first championship in 20 years, he did so against a ranked team and in a way that made it look like he completely outcoached us, which he did. He probably has a new job as I type this.

-We've been to five MACCs with four different coaches and every time we look unprepared. It's always one of our worst games of the season or THE worst game of our season. Crazy. Maybe we need to be the underdog once.

(12-07-2013 12:02 AM)NIU1981 Wrote:  First off, congratulations to Bowling Green. They outplayed us, outcoached us and are a very deserving champion. Well done, please win your bowl game.

Second, thanks to our players, coaches and staff for a terrific season. It didn't end the way we hoped but was an exciting ride and great fun while it lasted. I've rarely had more fun watching the Huskies than this season. It hurts to lose but most teams would trade places with us in a heartbeat, don't forget that.

Other thoughts:

-Bowling Green's O and D lines dominated this game from start to finish. Just a great performance by those units and of course everything starts from there. Some of that is getting your guys ready to play and I guess ours weren't.

-Bowling Green's QB was also fantastic tonight. He had all day to throw but still. And the few times we got pressure he usually squirted out of there for positive yardage. A great, clutch performance. Their running back is really good too. He kind of glides around out there and always picks up positive yardage, very hard to tackle.

-Our missing offensive skill guys finally caught up with us. We got away with it against lesser competition but not tonight. I dare say DaRon Brown, Deucee Turner, Sebastiano, Keith Harris and Akeem Daniels would have helped. Tommylee doesn't look 100% either. Everyone likes to harp on DaRon for his occasional drops but his absence was the biggest impact tonight. Without him we basically couldn't run our offense. When DaRon and Tommylee are playing and 100% we work the perimeter hard with them with bubble screens and jet sweeps, which then opens the middle for Lynch. We worked everyone outside in all season. With Brown missing they were able to double Tommylee and not worry about the other guys, thus allowing the middle to focus on stopping Lynch. We ran no semblance of our offense tonight because we didnt' have the players. You know its bad when Lynch is trying to force the ball to Matt Williams and Chad Beebe in the championship game. I thought they coulda/shoulda used Spencer more but it was going to be tough anyway. This game made Lynch look bad but it was not his fault.

-Re the missing offensive guys, we can't whine too much because no one's had better luck than us the last two years but it is tough when it fundamentally changes your offense. Would like to have another crack at it with those guys present but of course you only get one shot.

-Nice game by Mat Sims, he killed those long field goals.

-Our defense, what the hell? On a night when our offense was shorthanded they needed to step up and were nowhere to be found. No QB pressure, bad tackling and worse coverage. How many completely blown coverages were there? That was embarrassing. I was having flashbacks to the Novak years when every play against Toledo was a jailbreak. Bowling green completely, utterly outschemed us tonight and as I said, the tackling was awful too. Just an F minus by the defense. Imagine what OK State would have done to us, I guess we dodged a bullet there.

-It didn't really impact the game but the officials repeatedly missed the spot by a yard or more, sometimes two yards. Really bad. It went both ways but just a terrible job by the officials there.

-For those of you who may have missed it, after halftime they mentioned that the correct call on the onside kick should have been a 15 yard penalty against us. When the ball is kicked directly into the ground and takes a big hop the receiving team gets an opportunity to field it before being hit. So the officials got that sort of right although for the wrong reason.

Agree so much with the bolded. I knew we were in trouble when Matt Williams (no offense to him, he was fine) had what seemed like 100 targets in the first half.

Ref's really screwed up the kick. I thought we should have kicked from the 20 after the penalty. That ended up being a very key play in the game.

Depth at receiver - I don't think so.

Our secondary may have well been Elk Grove village tonight...what a bunch of clowns

No excuses here......we were rolled over tonight, at times it was embarassing....their WR's just sitting there WIDE OPEN waiting for the ball
we were outcoached.....Carey has to learn from this game. don't worry about him going anywhere anytime soon....time to evalutate your coordinators

+1000

we tried to set up the run with the pass as opposed to what has been successful all year, in setting up the pass with the run. i don't care if BGSU was stacking the box, the fact that they forced us to pass and give up the run so quickly took us out of our strength.

Did anybody have 82 tonight?

I saw a few linebackers wave as he went by them.

(12-07-2013 12:16 AM)huskiealum03 Wrote:  we tried to set up the run with the pass as opposed to what has been successful all year, in setting up the pass with the run. i don't care if BGSU was stacking the box, the fact that they forced us to pass and give up the run so quickly took us out of our strength.

lol.........what? Did you miss the entire middle of the season when we threw on almost every down in the first half to stretch the defense? In fact, I can't think of one game where we set up the pass with the run.

(12-07-2013 12:20 AM)huskie1stdown Wrote:  I saw a few linebackers wave as he went by them.

I saw Bass chasing him a couple of times.....man, it was pathetic

Tonight, we received it the hard way.

What is up with Brown? Is he day to day?

BG outplayed us - no question. Some issues though - from the start BG had MAJOR holding on the O line, the first drive there were at 3 major calls missed. Carey has more idiotic timeouts than any coach I have seen in years. And what the hell did they have a running play for the last drive of the first half and then start to burn TOs?

Carey needs to realize that he is THE NUMBER 1 face of the football program. Still embarrassed by several interviews where he just says "we only care about the next game". That is fine if you are Lovie Smith - not, but when you need to get FANS to go to games being a boring personality is not good. Oh for the days of Joe Novack and Dave Doren (Kill was a goof with the media too). When you are not a major program you need to be media friendly not a Goof!

Finally the D sucked all year. Carey's biggest flaw was acting like they were good. Anyone who wasn't a blind NIU home like MadDawg saw that. At some point you need to challenge them publicly and not kiss their ass.

Offense was slightly limited due to injuries and lack of key players, but let's be honest we did not lose because of our offense. You can't give up 47 points and expect to win a game.

The pass defense problem was schematic. Their guys were so WIDE open you would have thought we had all fallen down. We did not get out juked or beat, we got lost.

Congrats to BG they have a good team. Their line play was excellent. Our guys came to play, if we had a better defense scheme we may have won. The game reminded me of 2003 season, we got beat by BG/Toledo with passes in the middle of the field.

It was the most pressure to win a game on our Huskie team that I have ever witnessed. Very difficult spot to win a game to get a BCS bid and the other guy does not have to.Tough finishing it out.

(12-07-2013 01:05 AM)NIU05 Wrote:  The pass defense problem was schematic. Their guys were so WIDE open you would have thought we had all fallen down. We did not get out juked or beat, we got lost.

Congrats to BG they have a good team. Their line play was excellent. Our guys came to play, if we had a better defense scheme we may have won. The game reminded me of 2003 season, we got beat by BG/Toledo with passes in the middle of the field.

It was the most pressure to win a game on our Huskie team that I have ever witnessed. Very difficult spot to win a game to get a BCS bid and the other guy does not have to.Tough finishing it out.

I think your last paragraph described a choke. I knew our D would suck but our offense only looked good on a couple drives. I thought when they came out and scored to start the second half we would be back on track but there were numerous questionable calls after that and just bad performance throughout.

No hitting and why the fu*k did we try all those field goals? It's the CHAMPIONSHIP GAME!

BG looked better in all phases of the game. Hope they play this well in their bowl. At least the D braintrust has several weeks to work on the D. Hopefully they can find a scheme that works. Can see why D backs are a large part of the upcoming recruiting class with the pass defense performance ( or lack thereof) tonight