Complete Disaster

Well, that was awful.  A complete embarrassment, with few redeeming features and none on the defensive side of the ball.

BG's defense was completely unprepared for this game.  They were awful at tackling, played soft in coverage and yet still had people wide open.  The defense made no adjustments.  No press coverage, no adjustment to cover the middle of the field that was wide open all night.  No pressure.  It was an easy night for WKU's offense and they totally made BG pay.  In fact, WKU had a couple of drops, too.

There is no other way to put it...WKU humiliated the Falcons tonight.

This wasn't Wisconsin or WVU or Michigan racking up those kinds of points, it was Western Kentucky.  No disrespect.  I think we indicated in the pre-game that this team was better than people might have thought, but they aren't this good.  They were not picked to win their division in C-USA.  And with the team BG returned, this simply should not have happened.  I could have seen losing.  A 28 point defeat?  More than 700 yards allowed?

You aren't going to get any sympathy here for the "adjusting to a new system" argument.  Changing to a new system was a choice, first made by our AD and then by our Coach.  NIU has stayed competitive through coaching changes by not changing systems--by keeping the same system.  A coach like that could have been hired and the coach could have coached that way.  If there are problems with an "adjustment" it is on them.

Obviously, this is a non-conference game and BG has 11 more to play and this could all be an unpleasant memory in December.  I would be thrilled for that to be the case.

However, this wasn't even close to being a winning effort on defense.  Not even within shouting distance...and we were using guys who know how to play--a senior dominated defense.  I didn't expect us to hold teams under 20... but teams in the MAC would also have torched this defense tonight. That's a 9 loss defense.

So, if it is going to be an unpleasant memory, things are going to have to significantly improve...like a night and day improvement over what was out there tonight.  It is going to take some work for this to be the outlier that apologists would like to think it is.

The offense did come around and I thought played pretty well once they got going.  Maybe we are going to need to win 45-38 every week.  The program has tried that approach before.

I remember how excited we were to beat Tulsa last year...and then they turned out to be a lot worse than we thought.  Let's hope we're not Tulsa.

The other worrisome thing is that this was our best chance in the first four games to see what we had.  VMI will tell us nothing (in fact, will probably be a kind of false positive), and if Indiana and Wisconsin score a million, that's not unexpected, either.

More tomorrow.  If you thought our program had progressed past this kind of thing, boom, it is 2010 again, except with a championship team that returned a bunch of starters.