Bret Bielema recaps Illinois’ season-opening win over Toledo

Bret Bielema praised the home crowd, which gave Illinois its largest season-opening attendance since the 2010 season, as the Illini got a last-second win over Toledo Saturday night.

“Gave too many things away, at the half, we had 9 penalties for 90 yards, that’s just not us,” he said. “They had 5 for 20, I made sure I pointed that out to the officials, want to balance this out a little bit. But obviously we created some of those things ourselves. In the second half, just had one penalty, but it was critical.”

Bielema noted that 2 personal foul penalties led to 10 points.

“That’s the stuff you can’t do and expect to win, especially in our conference,” he said.

Bielema said Luke Altmyer probably has 1 ball he wants to take back, but “that guy, his presence, his demeanor, that guy taking the field, I just looked at him, he gave me a wink.”

When Illinois needed to get into field-goal range, Bielema said Altmyer looked at him and said, “I’ve got you.”

Casey Washington was also mentioned by the coach.

“He’s just a guy, his journey, his story, a lot of you guys know it, right, when I got here, he had some thoughts in his mind and went to Wake and then came back and the NCAA let him come back, and from the game-winning 2-point play against Penn State to really last spring, I thought, ‘This kid’s playing with a purpose.’ had a really good spring, had a really good summer, had a really good fall camp, got a little dinged up, so he missed about 10 days, but it was killing him to get back out there. For him to make that play there at the end, obviously it was a good throw, but he was something special to come down with that.”

Here’s Bielema’s entire press conference:

Keith Farner

Keith Farner has written about college football for newspapers and web sites since 2005.