Purdue 21, Illinois 14: We Lost to a Team that Lost to Rice

Questions raised during and immediately after the Illini's 21-14 loss to Purdue:

• Did the team not know this was an 11:00 (CDT) start?
• What happened to that punt return "breakthrough" Ron Zook talked about this week?  Did we have a single positive yardage punt return play in the game?
• We were down 21 points in the first half, so why did we wait until the end of the fourth quarter to run anything resembling a hurry-up offense?
• Spiking the ball with one second left in the first half - really?
• Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that our team doesn't understand time management when our coach doesn't know how to manage the clock either, should we?
• How long will it be before we return to the top 25?  And will Zook still be the coach when it happens?
• If we just got pantsed by a team that couldn't beat Rice and barely beat Middle Tennessee, is there any way for us to beat Penn State, Michigan, or Wisconsin...or Minnesota?

Illini vs. Purdue Preview: Cannon Fodder?

I guess we all knew it was going to end sometime.  And since the Illini aren't going to finish the season undefeated, now we'll find out whether last Saturday's loss to Ohio State was just a bump in the road, or...whatever the opposite of a bump in the road is...the beginning of a giant sinkhole, I guess.  This week, the Illini leave home for just the second time in 2011 as they make the short trip to West Lafayette to face the Purdue Boilermakers (3-3, 1-2).  And for the third straight week, the winner takes home a trophy.  At stake this week - the Purdue Cannon (not pictured, left, but I'd love to win a trophy that looked like that).  Last year, the Illini claimed the Cannon for the first time since 2002 with a 44-10 victory, but that was an injury-riddled Purdue team we knocked around in Champaign.  Will a healthy bunch of Boilermakers be able to turn the tables on the Illini this year?

Illini-Purdue: Not Exactly a Recap

There's not much need to rehash Tuesday night's Illinois loss at Purdue. It was the Boilermakers' Senior Night, and they are tough at Mackey Arena (16-0), so it's not a shock that the Illini came close and lost. Instead of focusing on the micro level, I'd rather take this opportunity to focus on the macro level.

When Matt Painter took over as head coach at Purdue, he inherited a mess. In Gene Keady's final season, the Boilermakers lost 21 games. However, in Painter's second season - in the year before his highly-touted recruiting class (Hummell, Johnson, and Moore) arrived in West Lafayette - he guided Purdue to the NCAA tournament and even won a game. And of course, things have only improved for Purdue since.

Contrast that story with Painter's former boss. Despite being in year two of the "Weber Can Recruit" era (two-thirds of Weber's highly-touted recruits already on campus), the Illini find themselves in a familiar position: kicking around the .500 mark in conference. If they beat Indiana on Saturday to get to 9-9, their overall Big Ten record in the five years since Dee Brown and James Augustine graduated will be exactly .500 (44 wins and 44 losses). For the fourth time in five years, the Illini will enter the Big Ten tournament needing to win a game to be sure of getting an NCAA tournament bid. And next year we can expect more of the same (if not worse), since four seniors are departing and only five players on the 2011-12 roster will have played any meaningful minutes in their Illini careers.

To summarize: Matt Painter needed only two years to reverse a horrible situation at Purdue; he started doing so before his best players arrived; and he's kept the arrow pointing upwards over the last four years. Even if we gloss over the fact that Bruce Weber didn't inherit the situation he's in - he created it - he's now had two years with more talented players on hand, and the program still shows no signs of progress. So how much more time does Weber get to turn the Illini program around? My two cents: if it hasn't happened by now, it's looking less and less likely that it's ever going to happen.

Just When I Think I'm In, They Push Me Out

Another home game against a ranked opponent (Purdue), another loss for the Illini. This one was eerily reminiscent of last year's home loss to Purdue - in both games the Boilermakers played poorly in the first half, but the Illini were unable to build up a big enough cushion to hold off Purdue during the Boilermakers' second half surge.

If it wasn't clear before, it's certainly clear now that to beat a good team, the Illini need Demetri McCamey to have a good game, and a game in which McCamey shoots 1-10 from the field (with as many missed dunks as made baskets) won't get it done against a team like Purdue. It would help if the Illini had another point guard on the roster to run the show when McCamey is in a funk, but we won't have one until next year, when it's too late to help McCamey. Hmmm...you'd think after having Dee Brown and Deron Williams during his first two seasons at Illinois, Bruce Weber would be OK with multiple point guards on the roster, or at least that he'd recruit more than one every four years. But I digress.

So Illinois falls back to .500 in Big Ten play, which amazingly is still good for 4th in the conference standings - with three weeks to go before the Big Ten Tournament, only three teams (Ohio State, Purdue, and Wisconsin) have winning records in conference play. As poorly as the Illini are playing, if they win their remaining home games (Michigan, Indiana, Iowa), they'll finish no worse than .500 in conference play and probably still make the NCAA tournament. But today's game represents a wasted opportunity - other than possibly upsetting Michigan State at the Breslin Center, this game was probably the Illini's last reasonable shot at a statement win during the regular season, which means that the Illini can't afford to slip up in any of those remaining home games. It also looks as if this team incapable of building momentum and putting together a string of good games, so even if they do somehow get to the NCAA tournament it'll be as a one-and-done proposition. Considering that we had pretty much everyone of consequence back from last year's team and added some high-impact freshman, that's another major disappointment that falls at the feet of Bruce Weber.