It didn’t take long for Juice Williams to summarize the true meaning of Saturday’s outcome at Memorial Stadium.
“If we go to State College and play like this, we’ll have our heads handed to us,” the Illinois quarterback said.
With next week off, the Illini have two weeks to prepare for the opening of Big Ten play Sept. 27 at Penn State.
They almost certainly will go there as an unranked team because Saturday’s 20-17 escape act against Louisiana-Lafayette is certain to drop them from No. 24 in the Associated Press poll.
The Ragin’ Cajuns (0-2) of the Sun Belt Conference went in as 25-point underdogs and kept the Illini (2-1) on the ropes until Garrett Edwards fell on an onside kick with 18 seconds to play, letting the crowd of 58,632 exhale.
“A win is a win, [but] we’re not happy with the way we’ve played,” coach Ron Zook said. “The biggest thing is playing with emotion. For whatever reason, we’re not flying around like we have to be flying around.
“This is the first game the offense didn’t play very well, and the defense did play well today.”
After scoring 42 points in an opening loss to Missouri and 47, the highest in Zook’s four seasons, against Eastern Illinois last week, the offense looked like it had started its week off early, scoring only one touchdown. It came on Williams’ 10-yard pass to Daniel Dufrene that gave the Illini a 17-3 lead.
It was left to the defense and special teams to save Illinois from an embarrassment.
Senior linebacker Brit Miller provided Illinois’ first touchdown, grabbing the ball from quarterback Michael Desormeaux and sprinting 27 yards for a first-quarter score that made it 10-0.
“We practice that every day,” Miller said. “It’s the most boring, mundane part of practice, but it paid off today.”
The rest of the scoring came from kicker Matt Eller. With the help of a 17 m.p.h. wind at his back, he drilled a 51-yard field goal that started the scoring in the first quarter.
Then with 1 minute 36 seconds left, he had the wind at his back again and provided the winning points with a 27-yarder that made it 20-10.
Eller, a redshirt freshman in his first year as the No. 1 kicker, was asked which kick was more pressure-laden.
“I guess I’ll have to say the one at the end to make it sound better or whatever, but there really wasn’t too much pressure on either one,” Eller said.
He missed from 39 yards against the wind in the third quarter.
The Ragin’ Cajuns replied to Eller’s final kick with a 60-yard drive that ended with Desormeaux’s 11-yard pass to Erik Jones, which a replay review turned into a touchdown that led to Garrett’s heroics.
What were the offense’s problems? The Ragin’ Cajuns surprised the Illini with a three-man line, but Zook preferred to talk about emotion even if he couldn’t ignore the math.
“That team gave up 633 yards of offense last week [in a loss to Southern Mississippi],” Zook said. “We’re going to learn from it.
“Maybe the offense got its [bad] game out of its system. Maybe we can be ready for the Big Ten and ready to go.”
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tabannon@tribune.com
