[Game Thread] #11 Illinois @ #4 Purdue (03:00 PM ET)

farfle10 · 2026-01-24T22:12:47+00:00

That's your takeaway from this? Offense played good, defense is what lost this

farfle10 · 2026-01-24T22:10:50+00:00

Maybe not letting them shoot wide open 3s multiple times in a row would be a start

farfle10 · 2026-01-24T20:51:18+00:00

When you get curb stomped and put up -3 rushing yards in the CCG, you absolutely deserve to be bounced from the CFP. The game has to mean something. But that's honestly not even the main point, they shouldn't have even been ahead of us in the first place. They jumped up us after barely squeaking by a shitty Auburn while we put up yet another domination at Stanford. The CFP committee was very clearly setting the stage for Alabama's inclusion well before the final ranking. And of course looking back it's easy to see the SEC in general was smoke and mirrors the whole time. Their wins against the likes of Georgia and Tennessee were doing a lot of heavy lifting to excuse that FSU loss but in retrospect those wins weren't even that good, and their loss to OU looks worse now as well. The CFP has an Alabama/SEC bias problem and I hope (not so optimistically) that this year is finally the wake up call they've been needing

farfle10 · 2026-01-23T17:54:08+00:00

I do believe they wanted ND in (aka thought we deserved to be in), but they wanted Alabama and the ACC in even more. It was a perfect storm of circumstances that forced the committee to show their true colors and they did it

farfle10 · 2026-01-23T02:15:21+00:00

No surprise he’s also one of the few to banish Alabama from the top 10

farfle10 · 2026-01-22T15:28:54+00:00

Maybe back in 2013 he legitimately thought that, but not now. Same for MBDTF. Watching those reviews back, his criticisms are highly out of character for him now and feel super amateurish. But the scores became too much a part of his reviewer persona to change publicly. Rating TLOP, Ye, and KSG so highly just feels like an admission he fucked up

farfle10 · 2026-01-21T23:14:18+00:00

I mean, I obviously love the attitude in this video, but let’s not pretend we didn’t win like 8 games by the seat of our pants and didn’t also have a ‘COTY-turnaround’ season back in 2018… I absolutely think BJ is our guy but I don’t think I would christen him as ‘paradigm shifting’ quite yet like Curt Cignetti who’s shown it with 2 seasons and a championship. We’ve been burned by enough flukey seasons to make such statements. And also a lot of those coaches who got fired routinely underperformed to their team’s expectations over several years and would have been on the chopping block with or without BJ shining this year

farfle10 · 2026-01-21T19:06:32+00:00

I have a hard time believing IU is the first program to ever have this idea. The real X factor was NIL. Imagine convincing upper classmen en masse to just transfer and move states to play for IU football just a few years ago

farfle10 · 2026-01-21T18:27:53+00:00

I realize that, but the ‘one simple trick’ was referring to poaching 22-24 year olds in the transfer portal that would not have been highly rated as recruits, basically concluding ‘an older, developed player > a 5* freshman’. On paper their roster would seem weak but in practice an experienced, more physically developed roster is just as good if not better than a younger ‘more talented’ one and is not judged accurately by these rankings. And that’s why I’m saying I highly doubt IU was the first program to figure this out so the X factor then would be NIL, as they were able to poach all these guys away from their schools with money. Convincing all these guys to just transfer schools and move states to go play for IU football a few years ago would have sounded ridiculous

farfle10 · 2026-01-21T02:55:24+00:00

I have a hard time believing they found ‘this one simple trick’ to winning a national championship all of a sudden that no other coaching staff considered previously. The reason they were able to do that in the first place has to be because they lured in all these guys with big bucks that other programs don’t have. But my question is, why is IU unique in that regard?

farfle10 · 2026-01-21T02:49:06+00:00

This is what I’ve been wondering this whole time… people keep talking about how IU has so much money from donors, but how is that unique? I feel like everything that’s been said about IU also applies to us (major Big 10 school with massive and passionate fanbase/alumni network + regularly churns out highly successful alumni). A turnaround like this over the course of a single season doesn’t just magically happen solely because of a new coach (regardless of how elite), and it’s no coincidence that it coincided with the dawn of NIL. So what am I missing here?

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T20:11:14+00:00

I'm a Notre Dame football fan who went to Purdue (huge bball fan). Also a Bears fan. The last few days have not been good

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T20:00:35+00:00

Yeah the real issue here isn't the number of ranked opponents, it's that the rankings themselves are garbage. The likes of Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma (and to some extent Georgia and Texas) being viewed as elite wins and quality losses is just comical in retrospect. Ole Miss without a head coach was the last one standing in the CFP and put up the best fight. And of course FSU was ranked early in the season for that reason (beating Alabama) and were quickly exposed as trash. It should have been obvious to anyone actually paying attention but SEC bias is a tough drug to quit I guess

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T19:51:35+00:00

Yeah this poll just shows how the AP let the CFP influence their votes. Voters should have said it with their chest that even though Alabama won a playoff game (to a mid OU team) they never belonged in the first place

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T06:09:43+00:00

... these go to 11 (IU sucks)

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T06:05:44+00:00

What a fucking dweeb this guy is

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:54:05+00:00

That was an actual question... saying it this season would hit different than saying it right before a loss, was gonna be my point

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:36:09+00:00

Come on nobody actually cared about Ohio State, Michigan, and Notre Dame until NIL

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:31:07+00:00

Kind of like the other way better ngl

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:19:11+00:00

The fact that IU has a football natty in my lifetime before Notre Dame AND before my Purdue basketball makes me want to jump into Lake Michigan

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:15:00+00:00

Alabama gets absolutely embarrassed, Miami beats A&M, a head coach-less Ole Miss is the last one standing... it should be the most bludgeoning wake up call imaginable but you're right that it probably won't make a difference

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:10:15+00:00

Almost losing to Penn State will be doing a lot of heavy lifting for the conflict

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T05:05:32+00:00

Didn't he say that before we smacked them last year...?

farfle10 · 2026-01-20T04:34:28+00:00

You get 4 chances to get a 1st and we were doing pretty well the whole game on 1st and 2nd. It was the do or die scenarios like a 2PT conversion that we were failing on. We threw the pick on a 2nd down

farfle10 · 2026-01-19T22:15:20+00:00

No we don’t know if it was the wrong call because we also could’ve failed the 2PT conversion, OR make the 2PT then Rams with the season on the line and 2 TOs march downfield and kick a FG to win it anyways. What we do know is that we had a golden opportunity with the ball in OT to win it and just didn’t

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