Freshman Jersey Number Day was actually yesterday. But now, at 10:53 pm on the following day, I finally have a chance to write about it. I feel like the moment has passed and the crowds have gone home, but FJND 2017 I shall write. Because numbers are
What were we just saying about speed? Wait - when you hear that, I start sounding like any other lower-end-of-the-Power 5 fan, talking about a lower-ranked player and saying "but he has speed". I need to add some context here. As discussed in the
Excited to start writing about (player name) from (city name). A certain watch company is helping me get started with this fancy (team name) watch. Here are the nominees for 75th through 71st most-important Illini football players in the 2017 season
Massive linemen, tiny skill players. That seems to be the Lovie thing. Every Illini coach has said "we need to increase team speed" the last 30 years, but Lovie seems to want that over everything. Linemen, massive, lumbering. Skill players? As fast
It's Lift For Life week again. Which means it's time to challenge those damn millennials over at The Champaign Room to see who can help Illini football raise more money for rare disease research. Here's how you can get involved.
The football team
We'll never know. That's my mantra for every football player who has ever verballed to Illinois before July 1. We'll never know what kind of offer list they would have ended up with. Now, this can be spun into crazy spin, so I have to be careful here
I really need a database. Like, a big spreadsheet of all the Illini football rosters the last 35 years. I'm fairly certain this will be the youngest team of my lifetime, but I don't have the statstics to prove it. Yet. You know, what I really need is
It's times like this when I realize how much I rely on the opinions of others. I like to say that these posts are "an independent evaluation of the athlete's film with a deep dive into team needs and scheme fit", but a review like this is so difficult
With the second installment of the series, we cross over into scholarship players for the first time. The 90~86 list was all walkons - now you'll start to see freshmen entering the list. And if you're a freshman and you're this far down on the list,
Ah yes, the camp offer. It's a yearly June tradition. June is when you hold camps, which means you get to see players up close. Some of them pop off the page and you offer on the spot.
Last year, the camp guys were Marc Mondesir and Tony Adams.
Michael Finke. Leron Black. Those are the only two forwards on the Illini roster next year. Kipper, OK, kind of. Let's call him a 3/4. But when Finke or Black are in foul trouble, we're in trouble. So Brad Underwood set out to find a forward who could
90 Days to Illini football! Which means the return of The 90 Illini where I rank every player from 90 to 1 in a summer-long countdown to the first game. First, some history on this IlliniBoard series, and then I'll get to ranking the first five players
I will now give you my opinion on Illini goings-on that have happened over the last two weeks. You've already digested them and forgotten about them, but I will now act as if my opinion is important. I'm a newspaperman in a blog world. Here goes
Haven't typed up an airplane post in a while. I'm currently on a plane flying back from the mountains. My wife is asleep on my shoulder, which means I'm trying to only use my finger muscles to type. I think she can feel it when I type a "p" or a colon
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