I mean no offense to Mr. Zook, but I have to admit I’m excited to see the Zook era come to a close. You can read more here about his firing. 2007 and 2008 seasons were great, I guess we can thank Coach Zook for that…hard to argue against a Rose Bowl appearance. But, I think those great seasons were more about great players then great coaching. A 34 and 51 record is less than impressive, but I think the low point for me was this season’s game against Ohio State. It was our first loss of the season and of all days it happened to be my birthday.
With a little more than a minute remaining, down by 10 points, Zook makes the decision to go for it on 4th down when we were on the 17 yard line. I ask you, who does that? Nobody, that’s who! You take the easy field goal and then you set up for the onside kick and how to recover. You got a minute on the clock and if memory serves me they still had 2 timeouts left. That was simply a terrible coaching decision. I guess you can argue whether or not it cost us the game, but one thing is for sure it seriously took us out of the competition at that point.
Well, I hardly ever write a post up here without a moral to the story…so I guess I will give you your choice on this one:
A) The moral of this story is that change is good! Let’s embrace change and look forward with great anticipation to next season of Illini football and what lies ahead. Mark 7:9
OR
B) The moral of this story is that greed is bad! Don’t get greedy for a touchdown when the easy field goal is right in front of you. Proverbs 15:27
