Upon Further Review: Illinois

The day after most Purdue football games this season, GoldandBlack.com will rewatch the contest in an attempt to break down or highlight some of the finer points.

Understand, we do not have 11-on-11 video nor do we have either team’s playbook, so this will generally be a layman’s view on things.

Today: Purdue’s 43-27 loss to Illinois

PDF: Purdue-Illinois statistics

PURDUE DEFENSE

Obviously, Purdue’s communication and chemistry in the back end of its defense was an open wound that Illinois poured salt on by attacking with conflict-of-assignment-minded route structures with a senior quarterback who wasn’t going to miss.

This is probably different if mega-experienced Tony Grimes is out there, but this is also a hard reality of modern college football. Your starters ave very little experience playing together, let alone your backups playing with your starters. Purdue needed to be way better on this stuff and the experienced guys left out there could have done a better job making sure the stand-ins for Grimes knew their responsibilities too. That’s not inside-knowledge sort of perspective. That’s just team sports. Zone defense is way more complicated than just, ‘You take this path of grass here.’ We can’t claim to know the ins of outs of Purdue’s rules in what they’re doing here, but these are egregious breakdowns.

People jumped right to corner Traveon Wright and safety Tahj Ra El getting crossed up as the reason this happened and that’s certainly a big part of it, but those guys got left hanging by the cross-up on the front end, as two Boilermakers gravitate to the shallow cross here and corner Hudauri Hines (4) ends up completely lost.

This isn’t as bad between Smiley Bradford and Wright, as this is the soft spot in any zone, but this obviously needs to be tighter.

The back end of Purdue’s defense didn’t just crumble against the pass.

There is clearly a last-line-of-defense problem here.

Right play call at the right time as Illinois catches Purdue in an edge blitz, but someone needs to be rotating into this gap with better depth. There’s three defenders crashing into one another there. An’Darius Coffey (24) gets caught at a bad angle there in a short-field.

Illinois did block this play well up front, picking up the blitz (which ran right into the overloaded side of an unbalanced formation), opening the needed hole, then eliminating the gap-filler, but clearly this shouldn’t be this easy.

Luke Altmeyer did beat Purdue with two big-time throws down the sideline against one-on-one coverage. Those plays were defended acceptably. Good offense in those case, and Purdue needed pressure on the QB, which wasn’t easy to come by against consistently heavy-personnel fronts.

But to Purdue’s credit, it figured some things out on the fly to impact the Illini backfield.

Timely blitz call here, but also a really impressive individual play by Ra El.

Really effect confusion-sewing compound call here, as Purdue stunts its two edge linemen while bringing the corner blitz off that same side. The stunt draws all Illinois’ pass-protection attention, creating the sack for Ryan Turner.

Purdue made a smart adjustment with these unbalanced fronts creating matchups on the weak side. CJ Nunnally can really turn the corner.

Purdue needs to make this call. But the call worked, creating confusion in Illinois’ protection that allows CJ Madden to come free. For as much as Purdue broke down in the secondary on defense, it forced breakdowns up front.

The big plays erased the relevance of Purdue’s red zone defense being very good.

No All-11 video here, but you can use your imagination on how well Purdue handled itself in back-end coverage here.

PURDUE OFFENSE

Smart and effective game offensively from Purdue that created a potent ball-control sort of attach early that eased some burden off the pass-protection game by giving Illinois’ front a lot to look at and to think about.

Purdue created boundary pressure by attacking the edges with high-percentage completions to the boundary.

You neutralize aggressive, heavy-pressure defenses by attacking vertical with horizontal. This misdirection-heavy stuff was working, the sort of action that could have popped something down the field before long.

At minimum, this stuff just being on tape might crack some running game seams down the line.

This Canada stuff is something you’re seeing a bit more in college football. You see here how aggressively Illinois drifts with the pre-snap motion.

BIG PLAYS ON OFFENSE

Picturesque blocking up front by Purdue here and great open-field running by Antonio Harris, but this play is made by Corey Smith, the receiver, the way he takes out his man’s outside angle, then immediately closes off the inside, too.

Purdue’s run-game execution was pretty good.

This is made by Devin Mockobee‘s blitz pickup, which knocks out the corner blitz that gives Purdue a numbers advantage on the back end. Great play by Mockobee.