Illinois Fighting Illini College Football Pregame Quote, 11/23/2020

Not many people or teams terrify me or us. We are playing a good football team and every week they’ve played we’ve seen that.

We played our best ball the last time out and we’re are excited about playing one of the best teams in college football.

It starts with the quarterback. Justin Fields is as good of a player as there is in college football. He is an excellent thrower. He so happens to be one of the best athletes in college football also, so he can hurt you moving around while buying time to throw the football. When you have a guy like that leading the offense it opens up everything.

The guys know Donny Navarro, that’s what he does daily. Whatever the team needs him to do in that moment is what he is going to do. When you walk on and earn a scholarship, you haven’t been given anything you have to earn it through play and that’s what we’ve gotten from him and from a lot of players this past week.

Mike Epstein and Chase Brown have both played well and that opens up so many things.

We made an emphasis to talk about how we practice but we practice well most of the time. A part of it was just getting everyone back to practice. When you take double digit players out of practice it’s not the same. Our guys show up each day.

We continue to correct mistakes and play hard. There are a lot of things we can still improve on. We left a lot of things on the football field this past Saturday.

Throughout this we’ve found out our quarterback position is a lot deeper than had been proven. We like it going forward. Brandon [Peters] played well, played good football and that’s what we expected from him.

We don’t want to rely on them turning the ball over but we took the ball away and that helped an awful lot. They did convert some third downs and you’ve got to give them credit. McCaffrey did a good job running the football‚Ķbut the guys were able to settle down and do some good things.

Nebraska was the first time we got to see our entire group together. We are still missing a couple players but it was the closest that we’ve had to having the entire football team together. It was more along the lines of what we thought we would look like when we had everyone together. Now the challenge for us it too take that; we set the bar last week let’s see where we can go from here.