Charles Grove: Pondering the little things ona road trip

BLOOMINGTON, ILL.

I often wonder what athletes think about while en route to a road contest. There was plenty of time on the bus trip from Chicago to the hotel in Bloomington after our flight into Midway.

And there wasn’t much scenery to keep your attention along the way unless you’re a fan of soybeans or farm equipment.

I was more concerned with how the temperature on the charter bus had a setting that low.

No matter the thoughts, there haven’t been too many friendly past experiences with the Redbirds for this year’s Penguins to draw much of anything from.

Last year’s 31-29 loss at home turned what looked to be a fairly promising season into a thoroughly mediocre one. After that loss the Penguins were blown out by South Dakota State on Homecoming and lost an overtime contest with Southern Illinois on the road.

And the road woes here in central Illinois are well documented over the past decade.

Perhaps the defensive backs were going over their coverage schemes as clouds blanketed the view from the airplane windows the closer we got to Chicago.

Coach Bo Pelini may have been wondering if his team will fix the “little things” that are so often crucial in conference games as the wing flaps raised up to slow the plane when the wheels touched down, showing all the small wires and machinery that aren’t visible to the naked eye when the plane is in flight.

Those little things aren’t necessarily apparent when you look at YSU’s statistics this season. And while it may have seemed odd that Pelini wasn’t happy after the South Dakota win when his team held the visitors to half its normal point total, but it was apparent his team didn’t pass the eye test a week ago.

And with all the “We want to win a national championship” talk that was brought up without questions in the spring and fall camps, that kind of performance simply isn’t good enough.

But the statistics at this point still are nothing to scoff at. The Penguins are holding teams to 18.5 points per game, which is strong even when two of the games so far have come against some obviously inferior competition.

The rushing attack has outgained opponents 1,121-485 so far and opponents are averaging just 2.8 yards per carry against YSU.

Even if YSU doesn’t quite have the look of a champion yet, those are encouraging signs. Those are the kinds of numbers really good teams put up. The Penguins now just have to mix those kinds of numbers with the overall performance Pelini and his staff want to see.

The passing game doesn’t have the eye-catching numbers that are obvious when looking at a stat sheet. Part of that is the instability at quarterback and the new wide receivers. But a large part of it has been a lack of execution as well.

Pelini said at this week’s news conference that he needs to see his players do what is asked of them, saying it doesn’t matter if 10 guys did their job as long as there was the one guy who didn’t, which screwed up the entire play by not doing one of the “litle things” correctly.

The trip has gone off without a hitch so far. There was nobody rushing through security at the Cleveland Hopkins International airport in a romantic-comedy style to catch the plane. There was nobody who rushed off the bathroom after the flight missing the convoy of buses outside the terminal.

And there was no reporter on his first road trip with the team screwing everything up by not knowing where he needed to be. Just a reporter on his first road trip who left his sandwich on the bus.

YSU would sure like that lost sandwich to be the only “little thing” to go wrong this weekend.

Charles Grove covers YSU for The Vindicator. Email him at cgrove@vindy.com