Northern Illinois Twitter Reax: Bark At The Moon

By Johnny Ginter on September 20, 2015 at 8:30 am
Decker not super happy
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I am writing this at 2:05 at night.

The reason why I'm writing this pithy Twitter post so late (other than the fact that I'm a serial procrastinator) is that I stayed up to watch the end of the Alabama/Ole Miss game.

As you probably now know, Ole Miss upset Alabama on the road, breaking a 17 game home winning streak for the Crimson Tide and prompting Nick Saban to try and kill Lane Kiffin with some kind of Scanners-inspired telekinesis. And really, the Alabama loss isn't Kiffin's fault! Well, not entirely anyway; ignoring your steamroller running back for long stretches of the game for no reason is an unforgivable and familiar sin. But truly Alabama's loss was a team effort, and was ultimately aided by some good ol' fashioned dumb luck on behalf of Ole Miss.

My point is this: Alabama lost. USC lost. TCU gave up 37 points to a garbage SMU team. Sparty looked mediocre against a service academy.

Teams will often look bad in September. That's alarming when said teams are supposed to look very, very good from day one, but it's a normal part of the college football season. The concept that football teams evolve over the course of the fall is antithetical to a lot of how we perceive the sport, but it's a reality that we're going to have to accept if we want to stop tearing out our hair and screaming at our pets.

There's obviously a lot that Ohio State needs to work on, and the reason why that freaks us out is because no one really expected that to be the case. But being talented and fallible also means that you have the opportunity to get better, and I'm confident that the Buckeyes will improve.

It should also be pointed out that it's probably more than a little disheartening when you don't blow out a team that you expected to. So the swag that Brutus put on display at the beginning of the day was fun, if a little misplaced a few hours later.

Oh yeah, and Jim Tressel was there! He took the field to an outpouring of love and rain, in what was a really cool moment in the Horseshoe.

Also important to remember is that as godawful as the offense looked, the defense put in work.

So while the overall effort didn't inspire much confidence (or did it?):

The efforts of the players and coaching staff on the safety net side of the ball should be recognized.

NIU only managed 190 yards of total offense and 2.6 yard per carry, which is kind of astounding. After the game, a lot of the defense took a nice step back to enjoy what they had accomplished (and some former players gave them their due as well).

And hey! Next Saturday is only a week away! That's the great thing about September; you've got plenty of time for redemption. Zeke selfie time:

Also someone check in with Stephen Collier to make sure that he's not stranded in a ditch somewhere near the Hudson exit or something.

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