Saturday’s 48-3 victory for the NIU football team in the 2008 home opener at Huskie Stadium was a nice win for the Huskies.

NIU needed this one after starting off the season 0-2 with close losses at Minnesota and Western Michigan.

But Huskie fans shouldn’t be getting too excited over a win against a team that has won only one game since 2004.

Anything less than a 35-40 point victory Saturday would have been a disappointment for NIU against a horrible Football Championship Subdivision Indiana State team.

NIU did what they needed to do, and that was win big against a team that has now been out scored 118-6 on the season.

Jerry Kill’s team dominated the game, gaining 363 yards of total offense compared to ISU’s 154.
There were many positives for the Huskies in Kill’s first victory as NIU head coach.

The Huskies forced three ISU turnovers, including a 54-yard interception return by Bradley Pruitt, for a touchdown.

Kicker Mike Salerno continued his good start to the season, going 2-2 on field goals, including a 46-yarder in the first quarter.

Quarterback Dan Nicholson, still not 100 percent from his January shoulder surgery, wasn’t hit one time.

NIU head coach Jerry Kill said that, even after the blowout win, there are still things that need to be corrected, including the three turnovers the Huskies committed Saturday afternoon.

“Offensively we can get a lot better; we made some mistakes,” Kill said at Tuesday’s weekly press conference. “You can’t turn the ball over three times.”

Every team has to have its games where they pay some smaller school to come up and play them. This usually results in the visiting teams getting beat pretty handily. For MAC schools, most of the time, this means games against FCS teams such as Indiana State.

NIU’s opponent this weekend, Eastern Michigan, played the Sycamores in week 1 and won 52-0.

There are always examples of teams letting these games come back to bite them. Michigan played FCS Appalachian State at the Big House last season. Appalachian State pulled off possibly the biggest upset in college football history with a 34-32 victory over the Wolverines.

When Alabama scheduled NIU for the 2003 season, the Crimson Tide didn’t expect the Huskies to earn a 19-16 win at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Saturday’s win was a nice one for the Huskies. It got them off to a good start with key MAC contests coming up as well as a trip to Tennessee. But anything that wasn’t a complete blowout might as well have been considered a loss.

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