Illinois holds on, and on, to stun No. 1 Ohio State

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The college football season Saturday didn’t turn on a dime package or a yard or even, in the famous Shoe, a foot.

It turned on an inch.

Call it the inch that roared -- loudest, perhaps, in Baton Rouge and Eugene.

Illinois not only upset No. 1 Ohio State, 28-21, before a crammed-in crowd of 105,453 at Ohio Stadium, it upset stomachs here and flow charts and bowl plans elsewhere.

The team from Champaign is known as the Fighting Illini, but for a few hours at least you might call them the Illinois Inchworms.

Imagine an unranked team, which has already lost this year to Missouri, Iowa and Michigan, running out the final 8:09 on the nation’s top-ranked defense.

But that’s what Illinois did to Ohio State -- which saw its streak of consecutive regular-season wins end at 28.

And it all, maybe, came down to this:

Illinois, up by a touchdown, faced fourth down and the width of Andy Rooney’s eyebrow at its own 33 with 6:53 left.

Illinois Coach Ron Zook first ordered his punt team on the field, but reconsidered after Ohio State burned a timeout because it had 12 men on the field.

During the break, Zook had his decision altered by his quarterback, Juice Williams, who wasn’t about to let one inch stand in the way of Illinois’ first win over a No. 1 school since 1956.

“Juice grabbed me and said ‘I will get you an inch,’ ” and I said, ‘You better,’ ” Zook said.

Williams said Zook actually told him, “Get it or I will hurt you.”

Williams got two yards, which kept the chains moving and the game-clock ticking.

Illinois never gave the ball it back.

When it was third and 10 at the 50, Williams ran for 12.

When it was third and two at the Ohio State 32, with 2:19 left, and Williams ran three more yards, the Buckeyes could only watch the clock run out on this year’s national title chase.

Maybe Illinois’ fourth-and-inch ends up changing everything. Maybe it become the inch that wins a national title for Oregon.

Today’s Bowl Championship Series standings will show Ohio State vacating the top position, with Louisiana State and Oregon probably moving up into championship position.

Critics will say it was better to expose Ohio State this year on Nov. 10 than in the BCS title game.

How, really, could a team that lost the starting quarterback, tailback and two wide receivers off the team that lost to Florida, 41-14, be the best team out there this year?

The answer was: Maybe the Buckeyes weren’t.

Ohio State got manhandled by Florida last January in Arizona and Saturday it got hoodwinked by the former Florida coach, Zook, who recruited more than 20 of the Gators’ starters in last year’s championship game.

Zook, an Ohio native, is now recruiting pretty well at Illinois and his team Saturday looked like the kind of outfits that has made Ohio State winless in eight bowl tries against the Southeastern Conference.

Operating out of the spread offense, Williams and the Illini offense shredded the nation’s No. 1 defense with a punishing run game setting up brilliantly timed play-action passes.

Illinois scored four touchdowns on a team that had given up only two at home all season. The Illini finished with 400 total yards (260 rushing) against a defense that had yielded an average of 221.

Williams completed only 12 passes, but four of them went for touchdowns of three, 33, eight and 31 yards. The sophomore, benched at times earlier this year for poor play, did not have an interception and rushed for 70 yards. The Illini played a near-perfect game -- no turnovers with only one penalty.

“They did all the things you need to do to win,” Ohio State Coach Jim Tressel said, “ . . . and unfortunately we didn’t do all the things you need to do.”

The Illini got an improbable performance out of Marcus Thomas, a freshman cornerback from Chicago who was forced into the game after star cornerback Vontae Davis was knocked out with a first-quarter injury.

With Ohio State nine yards from tying the score at 21-21 in the third quarter, Thomas deflected a Todd Boeckman pass into the end zone that was intercepted by teammate Antonio Steele for a touchback.

Illinois then drove 80 yards in nine plays and bumped the lead to 28-14 on a 31-yard scoring pass from Williams to Marques Wilkins.

Thomas weighs 173 pounds after starting the year at 154, but Saturday he had the skinny on the Buckeyes.

“Coach told me at the beginning of the season we’re going to need everybody,” Thomas said.

Thomas later stepped in front of Boeckman’s third interception and that gave the ball back to Illinois, with 8:09 left, at its own 24.

From there the game was given over to Williams, who ran out the clock with three third-down runs on the drive.

“He had a great desire to beat a great team in a great place,” Illini offensive coordinator Mike Locksley said of Williams.

Two years after Illinois, in Zook’s first year, left Columbus on the short end of a 40-2 loss, the Illini returned to rearrange Ohio State and BCS standings.

Wasn’t it thrilling?

“There’s going to be some guys happy about this because it screws up the rankings,” Williams said.

Illinois is 8-3 and headed to a better bowl game than it appeared to be headed before Saturday.

Ohio State fell to 10-1 and has to regroup for next week’s trip to Michigan with nothing left to play for except the Big Ten title.

Ohio State probably lost its chance to play in another national title game, but the winner of next week’s showdown in Ann Arbor will earn a pretty good consolation prize -- a trip to the Rose Bowl.

Linebacker James Laurinaitis said it was now time to “focus on Michigan because everybody around here knows this is ‘the week’ no matter what happens.”

Well, “what” did happen, and there’s no telling what might happen next.

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chris.dufresne@latimes.com