Stealing time to explain Petrino's complex system

So a funny thing happened along the way toward the Daily Herald's bowl preparation coverage of Illinois and Northwestern.

An enterprising young lad in St. Louis stole it all.

While I dined in Lafayette Square before the Illinois-Missouri Braggin' Rights basketball game on Wednesday, a burglar smashed my car's front passenger window and grabbed my workbag.

The laptop with hundreds of stories and notes and archived interviews? Gone.

The digital recorder with hours of taped conversations and golden quotes? Gone.

The notebooks with dozens of scribbled interviews? Gone.

As I understand it, St. Louis police are classifying it as a crime of passion.

Apparently that enterprising person couldn't wait another moment for me to put those Illini and Wildcats nuggets into easier-to-consume form in print or cyberspace.

But unless the perpetrator puts all that information on a blog, it's gone forever.

Well, there is another way to release it to a wider audience, but you'll have to trust me to recall some of the details.

For example, I'd been planning a lengthy article on first-year Illinois offensive coordinator Paul Petrino and his systems.

Petrino's complex running game comes from his father, Bob Sr., who taught it to his boys as the head coach at Carroll College, an NAIA school in Helena, Montana.

Illinois' passing game stems from New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin. Petrino's brother, Bobby, coached with Coughlin at Jacksonville from 1999-2001. When Bobby earned his first head-coaching job at Louisville, he brought Coughlin's passing system with him and taught it to Paul.

As soon as Petrino arrived at Illinois last winter, he put the entire offense on the greaseboard in his meeting room.

For teaching purposes, he breaks it up into “Seven Days,” but that's a misnomer. It took a week to teach each day prior to spring practice — and even that represented an accelerated process.

As Illinois wide receiver A.J. Jenkins said, “Learning the offense was my hardest class in the spring.”

Petrino taught the Seven Days once before spring ball, reviewed it during spring ball, and powered through it twice more during fall's two-a-days.

To say it's difficult to learn and carry out would be an understatement, but that's why Petrino hammers and re-hammers it into his players.

I asked Jenkins, on a 1-to-10 scale, to rate how complex previous offensive coordinator Mike Schultz's system was. He said it was a 4.

Then I asked about Petrino's system. He said it's a 9.

In Locksley's system, receivers ran pre-ordained routes and quarterback Juice Williams had to read everything. In Petrino's pro-style passing game, receivers and quarterbacks both make reads and adjustments based on the coverage.

Petrino, it's safe to say, does not lack confidence in himself or his offense.

When he arrived at Illinois, he had nothing but freshmen quarterbacks. He had true freshmen starting at fullback and tight end — two crucial spots in his offense.

He had no receivers who caught more than 16 passes in 2009. He had to work with three new starting linemen.

Nonetheless, Petrino said last week with a smile, he came in assuming he would have shattered the school's single-season records for yards and points by now.

While the yardage mark is out of reach this season — Illinois would need to stack up nearly 900 yards in Wednesday's Texas Bowl game against Baylor — Petrino knows exactly how many points Illinois needs to set the school's single-season scoring average.

“Thirty-nine,” he said.

Actually, he's off by 1, though maybe that's a coach's way of pushing his team beyond its limits.

While the Illini need just 6 points to set the overall points mark (390), they require 38 points against Baylor in order to break the 32.5 points-per-game average set by the 2001 Big Ten champs.

Next time:

Sorry for the Cliff's Notes' version of my feature on Petrino's offense. It would have been much better with all of my notes and quotes available.

Quarterback Nathan Scheelhaase was particularly insightful as he described just how much pressure Petrino and his hand-picked QBs coach, Jeff Brohm, put on him in practice to prep him for games.

We'll save that for next season.

As for the Northwestern stuff? While lots of the defense's bon mots are lost to the ages, I'll have something good on the team's seniors for New Year's Eve.

Provided I can hold on to my new laptop and workbag for another 48 hours.