Football Saturday is forgettable

I should have known Saturday was going to be bad. By 8:30 a.m., it was apparent that it wasn't going to be a good day.\nMy alarm went off at 6:45 a.m., which on a Saturday is just cruel and unusual punishment. But the real problem came when the clock had a snooze button, and the meeting time for the trip was 8 a.m. Something had to give, and when the phone was blowing up at 8:05 a.m., 8:08 a.m., and 8:12 a.m., I think you know which one won.\nSo the trip to exciting Urbana-Champaign got off to a late start, adding to the chipperness of five extremely tired sportswriters.\nIt was about to get worse. Thinking it would be a good idea to take a different route to I-74 to avoid the hellish construction on State Route 37, we headed up 67 instead. It would have been a good idea if we had any sense of direction. But no, we start going east when we wanted to go west, making it the first of three times our navigational skills were in the toilet.\nNow the caravan, really just two cars, of IDS writers were stuck in traffic for no apparent reason, and by the time we got moving again, the two cars were separated. I, driving one car, thought it would be a good idea to get on the cell phone while looking for the next exit. \nTranslation: Missed exit, complete loss of other car and serious consideration of turning back and crawling back into bed. Had I been able to look into the future, I would have.\nFinally, the trip appeared to calm down. Except when I tried to catch up with the other IU car. While attempting to pass a car going slower than Anna Nicole Smith having a conversation, I almost clipped a car that was in my blind spot. He didn't seem too angry; he just flailed his arms and used a choice finger a couple times. \nMy bad.\nFrom 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., the five of us managed to avoid ticking people off and getting lost. Then the game started.\nBut by the end of the second quarter Saturday, the IU-Illinois football game was unwatchable. The Hoosiers were getting their derrieres handed to them, and a second-half comeback was obviously not going to happen.\nIrritated by the trying trip to Champaign, then with the deplorable play by the Hoosiers, I took out my laptop, and wrote my column. I'd never been so happy with a laptop before in my life. The screen blocked out a majority of the third quarter, which wasn't worth watching anyway.\nSo I wrote my column. And it was scathing. It was insulting. It condemned the team's play that day.\nAnd I was ready to send it in. That is, until the post-game interviews. Sympathy set in for the team, and not being one to kick someone when they are down, I refrained from running the original column.\nFor a team that showed little emotion during the game Saturday, there was enough in the locker room afterwards to share with the entire IU community. A disheartened quiet filled the room as the team prepared to board the buses for the three hour trip back to Bloomington with nothing to think about except how the game went terribly wrong.\nCoach Gerry DiNardo looked like he was in a daze Saturday following the game. He had no answers for the IU team that was picked by even the Champaign local paper to beat Illinois. He was reaching when he blamed the cold weather as a reason for the Hoosiers defeat.\nSomebody better tell him that the weather is not about to get better. Neither is the Hoosiers bowl hopes if they play the next four games like they did against the Fighting Illini.\nIt's unexplainable how the Hoosiers looked so lost, so unemotional and so unprepared. This was their game to win, and next up is Northwestern. The Wildcats are also a team IU should beat.\nLord help us all next Saturday.