Nobody with the Gophers football program was shying away from the offense's subpar performance in a 20-10 home loss to Purdue on Oct. 1. After all, the Gophers scored a season low in points and rushed for only 43 yards, their fewest in seven years.
Coach P.J. Fleck said it's on him. Quarterback Tanner Morgan stressed his need to improve. And Kirk Ciarrocca, the man brought back to coordinate Minnesota's offense and return it to previous heights, took his share of the blame for the clunker, too.
"We have to play better and we've gotta coach better, and that's been our attitude," Ciarrocca said Wednesday.
After a bye week to stew over and find ways to correct the mistakes that haunted them — especially on offense — the Gophers have a bigger challenge awaiting them. Come Saturday at No. 24 Illinois, their words of atonement must become deeds of accomplishment in a game that suddenly is pivotal to their hopes of winning the Big Ten's West Division.
"The Sunday after [the Purdue loss], it was a lot of learning opportunities," Morgan said. "But you can't just take that in and move on and not learn from it. You've got to learn from it and then apply it. It's that stinging feeling of losing."
The loss stings more when looking at the West standings. The Gophers sit in fourth place at 1-1, a half-game behind first-place Illinois, Purdue and Nebraska, who each are 2-1. Look deeper, and you'll see how important Saturday's game becomes. A win would give the Gophers the head-to-head tiebreaker over Illinois while still keeping them within striking distance or ahead of Purdue, which is host to Nebraska.
Should they lose to the Illini, the Gophers would be 1-2 in the conference and on the wrong side of potential tiebreakers against both Illinois and Purdue.
In the eight previous years of the East-West division format, the West representative in the Big Ten Championship Game had no conference losses two times, one conference loss three times and two league defeats three times.
Illini winning with defense
Beating Illinois (5-1) won't be easy. The Fighting Illini, who defeated the Gophers 14-6 in Minneapolis last year, have the nation's top scoring defense (8.0 points allowed per game), the nation's top pass efficiency defense (80.75 rating) and have allowed only three touchdowns this season. They're also riding the momentum of back-to-back wins over Wisconsin (34-10) and Iowa (9-6) that vaulted them into the AP Top 25 for the first time in 11 years.
"Everybody in the country could see what they did the past two weeks on defense," Morgan said. "Their front seven is very physical, very talented."
Illinois defensive linemen Jer'Zhan Newton and Keith Randolph Jr. have combined for 45 QB pressures, the best among any duo in the nation. "These guys have size, power and quickness," Ciarrocca said. "They can run around you just as easily as run through you."
Hoping for a boost
In their 4-0 start, the Gophers offense averaged 294.5 rushing yards per game, with running back Mohamed Ibrahim rushing for 567 yards and eight touchdowns. Ibrahim missed the Purdue game because of an ankle injury, and the Gophers missed him dearly, rushing for only 47 yards, their fewest since 33 in a 28-14 loss at Ohio State in 2015. Fleck said he expects Ibrahim to play at Illinois.
Ciarrocca saw an immediate boost in morale during practice this week with Ibrahim back.
"It sure makes me smile, watching him practice and move around out there and seeing him at close to full speed," Ciarrocca said. "… It's human nature when you have a great player, and he comes back from an injury, that it helps pick you up a little bit. The kids are excited to see him out there."
Executing efficiently becomes even more important against Illinois, which, like the Gophers, loves to possess the football. Minnesota leads the nation in time of possession at 37 minutes, 59.4 seconds, but Illini aren't far behind at 33:58.
Ciarrocca is aware but not fixated on that statistic.
"Whoever gets the lead will have an advantage from that standpoint," he said. "But I try not to think about that, because when you do, what happens is you start to press and try to force things that necessarily maybe weren't there."
Instead, the Gophers will try to return to their consistent ways of the first four weeks.
"As an offensive unit, you need 11 guys playing as one, or obviously you're not gonna have a lot of success," center John Michael Schmitz said.
Ciarrocca stressed a back-to-basics approach during the bye week to prepare for Illinois.
"That was probably the worst game we had as far as our fundamentals went and with our details," he said. "Hopefully, we've got them moving in the right direction again."
