A Comparison to 2003

I have not posted here in many, many years (I haven't lived in Northern Illinois since 2004 if that gives you any indication), but I think this is worth a return. I’ve been thinking about the game, our performance, our history, etc. over the last day and a half, and I hope I’ve come up with some silver lining to what is currently happening. I was trying to remember another year in which we’ve been very talented, especially on defense, but couldn’t put much together offensively early to mid season, and I think I have found the analogy.

In 2003, we had a very good defense, but didn’t do much offensively early in the year. We beat ULM 49-7, then beat a weak Arizona 59-13 in Tucson (they were 2-10 that year), then struggled to put away Western Illinois, winning 35-7 (shades of Towson). The next game was that crazy one against Georgia in which we scored very late to win 17-10, but we didn’t do much offensively that game. In fact, UGA outgained us 411 to 285. David Greene had 314 yards passing.

After UGA, we turned around and whipped Miss. St. 41-6, then played Florida at home. If you remember, we did nothing offensively that game and wound up losing 19-7 to a decent Florida team. We could not run the ball, only rushing for 56 net yards on 24 rushes (you can get old box scores at Historic Stats). Mauck was decent but certainly not very good, going 19-33 for 231 yards and 2 INTs. I remember watching us not be able to get anything going in that game, seemingly completely out of sync, both in execution and in scheme.

From there, though, we seemed to slowly find an offensive rhythm. Mauck got better, and Justin Vincent emerged as the premier RB. Ironically, our next game in ’03 was also against South Carolina, and we won big in Columbia 33-7. Now I realize that this SC team is much better than that one, but this game is at home for us, and the first big home game of the year. Also, we only fell in the polls in ’03 after the Florida loss from #6 to #10, similar to our short fall yesterday. After SC, we went on a roll, blowing out Auburn 31-7, La Tech 49-10, Alabama 27-3 (a much worse Bama than this year obviously), then beat Ole Miss 17-14 in that great game against Eli & Co. Of course, you know how the rest of the season played out.

I’m not saying this team is going to run the tables and win the MNC like we did in ’03, but I do find some reason to be optimistic. We still have an outstanding defense (remember, we still only gave up 237 yards on Saturday), and we have good talent on offense. If we can patch the holes in our O line and they can execute effectively, I think we can still match up with anyone on the schedule. Miles has a big job to do this week in pulling this team back together, but I think we see a much improved offense on Saturday. Maybe history will repeat itself.