Thaindian News

Nov 19 (THAINDIAN NEWS) During the Illinois-Northwestern game on Saturday night, there will be only one end zone which will be used for offense, due to safety concerns, according to an announcement from ‘The Big Ten’ which was posted on ‘ESPN Chicago’.

There were concerns that the players could be injured because the east end zone is only a few feet from the right field wall. The wall is padding, but as a precautionary measure, the end zone will not be used.

So the offensive team will be facing towards the west end zone. The Northwestern athletic director, Jim Phillips stated on ‘ESPN’, “Though it’s not ideal, it’s the right thing. We’ve been planning for this for a while, there were no surprises. The field came out the way we thought, it ended up maybe being a little closer with some of the padding.”

He went on to explain, “As we looked at it — the visual aspect of it — this week, we just felt there was a low probability that something would happen. But had we taken every step that we could to ensure that the safety was maximized, and that we did everything we possibly could under our purview to make it as safe as possible? And the more we thought about it, the more we talked about it, we looked at it, we just felt like this was something we needed to do. And it was complete uniformity between the Big Ten conference, and Northwestern and Illinois. At the heart of it was to make sure we had done everything we could to make it safe.”

So ‘Big Ten’ announced the changes, which include the offensive plays all heading to the west end zone, all kickoffs heading to the east zone, when possession is changed the offensive team will face the west end zone, and after the coin toss, Illinois will have the west team bench during the first half, and Northwestern will during the second half.