Nearly 10 months had passed since the Fighting Illini football team last tasted victory.

After a lopsided 47-21 win against Eastern Illinois on Saturday, Illini coaches and players are doing all they can to make sure the taste lingers.

“Football games are hard to win,” said head coach Ron Zook. “Obviously, you want to play and you want everything to be perfect, and it wasn’t perfect and I think that’s probably a good thing … once again like I said last week in St. Louis, all things are correctable.”

After the loss to Missouri, Zook felt the running game and the defense – namely tackling – both needed to be improved. Now, a week later and with a win under his belt, Zook emphasized that the running game improved, but the number of turnovers and again, the lack of tackling, need to change.

On the ground, No. 24 Illinois accumulated 399 yards with a bulk of the yardage coming from quarterback Juice Williams. Totaling 174 running yards and two rushing touchdowns, Williams exhibited a more balanced offensive attack against the Panthers than he did when facing No. 6 Missouri.

“You establish a running game early that opens up everything else,” Williams said. “That was something we was able to do out there today and it felt good.”

Williams was so effective carrying the ball in the home opener that the signal caller broke Illinois’ single-game rushing record by a quarterback, a record he had previously set in 2006 against Purdue. The 6-foot-2 junior gained 100 yards in the first half alone. He added another 124 yards through the air to his receiving unit by game’s end.

Completing 16 of 25 passes, Williams still gave up two costly interceptions compared to Eastern’s one interception.

“We had a couple balls on the ground, I had two interceptions,” Williams said. “That’s something that we cannot do if we want to be successful.”

Even though the final score was impressive, Illinois started out the game slowly with Eastern holding its own throughout the first quarter. In the first two-and-a-half minutes of the game, Williams threw his first interception, immediately followed by EIU’s Bodie Reeder’s first pass and only interception of the game, which sailed into the arms of senior linebacker Brit Miller.

After regaining possession with 12:31 left to go in the first quarter, Williams connected to Chris Duvalt for a 16-yard touchdown pass.

Not to be outdone, the Panthers scored just four plays later to tie the game at seven. Eastern failed to score again until almost midway through the fourth quarter.

“They came out, you know, looking to knock us off, a double-A school, who’s pretty good at that,” Williams said. “They tried to come out and make a statement for their program. They gave us what they had and they put up a good fight.”

The Illini had 533 yards on offense compared to Eastern’s 278. On top of that, the Orange and Blue ran 80 offensive plays while EIU only took 54 snaps.

“No question, we’ve been outmatched the last two weeks,” Eastern’s head coach Bob Spoo said. “We had opportunities to take advantage of things, but we weren’t able to.”

One of Eastern’s missed opportunities included two missed field goal attempts by Tyler Wilke – from 52 yards in the first quarter and 36 yards in the third.

Where Eastern faltered Illinois thrived, as freshman Matt Eller solidified his position as the field goal kicker.

Eller recorded five PATs and two field-goals, hitting both in the second quarter from 21 and 42 yards out.

“It was good to get especially the first field goal, then the 42, so I feel pretty comfortable after today,” Eller said.

Even with the number of positives, the Illinois run defense continued to struggle. At a postgame press conference, Zook emphasized that stopping the other team’s running game will be essential if the Illini hope to contend in the Big Ten.

Senior defensive lineman David Lindquist predicted that practice this week will focus on “getting out there and getting fired up and hitting people.”

And Zook agreed.

“We gave up too many big plays again on defense,” Zook said. “Those are things we just gotta get back on and grind a little bit.”

The Fighting Illini will be back in action on Saturday, Sept. 13, when Louisiana-Lafayette makes the trip to Memorial Stadium.