Western Illinois Leathernecks football

We wanted to do things team-oriented, and I think winning championships comes with teams playing hard together.

It was a great game today, Western Illinois next, and then you got the conference play with Georgia.

That's right.

We're looking forward to next week's game and definitely not looking ahead.

We'll take a quick break.

When we come back, we'll take a look ahead.

The Tigers are back home, taking on Western Illinois.

We'll have Coach's comments about them after these messages.

Yeah.

Then they beat Western Illinois by a pretty good margin, but it wasn't necessarily as definitive as you might have hoped against an FCS team like Western Illinois.

And then Eastern Michigan was a little bit of a step forward because this is going to sound really simple, but they blew out a team that they were supposed to blow out.

And as simple as that sounds, it hasn't necessarily been simple.

So those are at least some encouraging signs.

But your margin for error is so much slimmer now as you're going up against the top 15 Penn State team in a very difficult environment there in Happy Valley.

so this gets to be one of those games where almost everything is probably gonna have to be clicking for the badgers um you know you just it's a different caliber of play and it's a test them in a lot of ways that you know the western illinois and the eastern michigans of the world really are not testing them

okay we heard for the packers the offensive line failures their big story what is the make or break part of this team as they enter into the increasingly misnamed big 10 season

Wisconsin competed with Notre Dame, but then Notre Dame after having a pick six, after getting their ground game going a little bit in the second half which we saw with Michigan State and CJ Carr making the better decisions than Colton Joseph just in general and Notre Dame having the superior talent, they pulled away and Wisconsin lost forty-one to thirteen.

They had a lackluster performance against Western Illinois.

They bounced back against Eastern Michigan winning fifty-four to ten.

One of the funniest things about college football, Eastern Michigan lined up to kick a field goal to make it forty-eight to thirteen in the end.

They need to win this game.

Penn State does.

You Wisconsin don't quite need to, but you need to show up because that effort against Notre Dame in the second half and the effort displayed against Western Illinois for the entire game is just not good enough if you're gonna take advantage of this schedule.

And I believe firmly that if Luke Fickell doesn't win more than seven games with that schedule, he might be toast at Wisconsin.

Real interesting

... you've got Illinois, Ohio State.

Those are a few right there.

Uh, I can't remember who Michigan plays, but that one is a significant game as well.

I would, I would think that in years past, now I'm not talking now that Indiana has put a product on the field that everybody has an interest in, they won the national champion, things like that, but prior to that, I think it had a negative impact on Indiana in terms of what they would draw on a Friday night.

And some of those Friday night games, if I remember correctly, were kind of the first two games of the season where they were playing at a G5 or a FCS level type of opponent.

I think one year they played Indiana State, then the next year they played Western Illinois on those Friday nights, and their crowds were just not there because of Friday night.

People were going to high school games for whatever reason, 'cause Indiana had not established-

The ball was way more accurate than it had been in the first couple of weeks.

And yeah, maybe it's because it's Eastern Michigan, who is not a great Mac team, but he struggled against Western Illinois, which is a mid to low tier FCS team.

And he looked like he came into this weekend.

It looks like the coaching staff came in this week and said, We are going to get Colton Joseph some easy throws, get his confidence going, and then let him throw it down the field a little bit and see what they can do.

You're playing, what is it, Western Illinois, which I didn't even know they had a team.

The Leathernecks.

The Leathernecks.

Well, you did know they had a team because after the Badgers went to the Final Four or the National Championship game in 2015 in basketball, they opened up with the Leathernecks in 2016 and lost.

Well, that's

on point for this organization.

catching 19 and a half in McComb.

Take it on Western Illinois, who looked all right against Wisconsin.

I thought they looked

good.

I

do think they are really bad.

Hard to believe laying points with Western Illinois.

They did a good job covering against Wisconsin at least last week.