After two tough home losses, Illinois football is ready to hit the road.

“We haven’t lost vision of where we’re at, where we’re going, or how we’ve got to get there,” head coach Ron Zook said. “We need to learn how to improve as a football team; we have to finish. Right now we’re going through some growing pains.”

The Illini face Penn State on Saturday in Happy Valley. It will be the team’s first road game since beating Michigan State in East Lansing, Mich., on Sept. 30.

“Our guys are excited about it,” Zook said this week. “They’re looking forward to it. This is a great football team, you think of the legends that have played there. Our guys, we’ve got some football junkies on the team. They’re excited to go up there.”

While the Illini suffered setbacks against Big Ten rival Indiana and then lost another heartbreaker to MAC opponent Ohio University, the team feels confident that it will hold things together on the road this weekend.

“We’re just ready to get back out there and play, show people what we really can do,” wide receiver Kyle Hudson said. “We’re a good football team, and we’ll show that.”

Penn State’s biggest weakness will be at quarterback, a position that has been plagued by injury. Head coach Joe Paterno said he expects his team to be ready to fight.

“You look at one game and they don’t do some things very well, then you look at another game and they do great,” Paterno said. “That’s typical of a young team, you never know what you’re going to get.”

Illinois should be well-rested for the game, having taken Sunday and Monday off to give players a break during midterms. But Zook said that hasn’t kept his team from getting fired up to get back on the field. He said he saw freshmen Juice Williams and Chris James watching film on their own and noticed senior DaJaun Warren head for the weight room on his day off. Both are signs, the coach says, that players are itching to get ready for games.

“We believe that record we have right now, they could have definitely went the other day,” Zook said. “We have five more games to continue to improve, to go out there and play.”