The highly anticipated return of quarterback Wes Lunt was a disappointment  for Illinois fans. The quarterback ended a 30-14 Illinois loss to Iowa with 102 passing yards and just one touchdown.

“You can’t point the finger at just one guy,” head coach Tim Beckman said. “This is a team game and will always be a team game. He didn’t play up to what he’s played before. But we can’t just point the finger at Wes. Nobody is responsible for a loss — when we lose, it’s all of us that lose.”

After missing four of the last five games to a fractured fibula, coaches and players were excited during the week of what his return would mean to the team. Before his injury, Lunt led the team with 1,569 passing yards and 13 touchdowns. He was averaging 313. 8 yards per game.

But Lunt failed to come close to that average. He had just 14-for-25 with 102 yards and just one touchdown. While the score was close early on, the Hawkeyes finally put the game away in the fourth quarter.

“It’s really frustrating,” Lunt said. “The defense did a great job in the early on keeping us in it and did a good job. As an offense our job is to score and we didn’t do that.”

Though Lunt said he didn’t feel rusty, the injury seemed to make him tentative and he didn’t come out with a big play until the end of the first quarter. 

He started the game with short passes, incomplete passes and was sacked once. His first long throw came more than 10 minutes into the game and resulted in a 31-yard touchdown grab from Mike Dudek. 

That was the longest pass Lunt would throw all game and by the fourth quarter, Reilly O’Toole was called into the game for a final Illinois drive. That drive resulted in a 31- yard touchdown pass to Dudek.

An injured offensive line posed problems for Illinois, as Lunt was forced to make short throws to avoid getting hit. 

Coaches said they didn’t plan on turning to O’Toole any sooner than they did,  because they’d seen Lunt perform in the past. 

“It’s not one guy that’s going to mess that thing up,” offensive coordinator Bill Cubit said. “There were a lot of things going wrong out there and they all happened at crucial times.”

What the team did find as frustrating were the penalties and the lack of third down conversions. 

Illinois completed just six of 16 third down conversion attempts. The team was penalized eight times for 59 yards. Five of those came from the offense, including an intentional grounding penalty on Lunt that resulted in a safety in the first quarter.