Five Years

January 1, 2030 is closer to today than January 1, 2020. It seems impossible that this is true, but it is. The whole "The 20's Belong To The Illini" thing we've been going on about? The 20's are now more than half over. I'll start workshopping some "if you think the 2020's were great, wait until you see the 2030's" slogans for the next decade.

In addition to that, my wife and I have now nearly reached five years in Champaign. We made the decision to move here on January 18, 2020, so Saturday will be five years from the day when we looked at each other across the table at the Effingham TGI Fridays and said "let's do this."

That story, if you're unfamiliar. I started my first Illini blog in 2009. I moved over to IlliniBoard to join Brumby in 2013. As that grew, it started reaching the point where I could maybe do this as my full-time career. In early January 2020, my wife got a call from her old boss. She knew we had lived in St. Louis for decades but asked my wife "is there any way you'd consider a job in Champaign, Illinois?"

That was a "the job is hers if she wants it" kind of thing, so my wife and I took that Saturday (in January of 2018 with Tyler covering the basketball game inside the State Farm Center that afternoon while my wife and I drove around neighborhoods) to explore Champaign-Urbana. I had lived here for five years in college, but she had only visited for football and basketball games. She wanted to see everything before we made a final decision.

We were planning to eat once we got back to St. Louis but we got hungry and stopped in Effingham. At that TGI Fridays, we discussed everything – our kids were all grown and out of the house, and if we were ever going to do something like this, it would have to be now – and we said yes to the stress.

She accepted the job and started training in early February. I put in my two weeks at the end of January and February 14th was my final day (after 24 years at the same job). We were set to launch the new subscription model for the website on March 17th when, uh, a little tiny global pandemic came along. The world came to a halt on March 12th (at least the sports world) and we put the website relaunch on pause.

At the same time as all of that – I mean, at the exact same time – Illini basketball was coming back online. This tweet is from January 13, 2020:

(God, Big I looks so good there. I miss you, Big I. We still have Fat I for football but it's just Regular Sized I for basketball these days.)

It's crazy to me to look back on that now. I don't mean that in a "wasn't Covid INSANE?" way, but in a "five years ago today, we were all still desperate for winning teams" way. Because of everything that happened those few months (leaving my job of 24 years, moving out of the St. Louis area for the first time since college, Covid) I can remember those weeks quite well. And it's crazy to think back on how desperate we all were for winning teams.

I think of it like this. Let's go back to March 13, 2020 when the NCAA Tournament was canceled. The entire Illini fanbase had one and only one feeling that day: "we FINALLY get back to the NCAA Tournament and there's no NCAA Tournament." We had been waiting for what felt like forever. And then with one cancellation it was gone.

Now? We haven't missed since.

Or maybe I should frame it this way. When I tweeted that we had finally re-entered the poll on January 13th, 2020, we had been absent from the previous 102 (one hundred and two!) AP basketball polls. It has been since early December in 2014 that we had been ranked. And even then, it was just for one week. We were ranked for one week that season before dropping out and one week the previous season (before dropping out), so those eight weeks in 2020 were the first time we had been really ranked since the great start to the 2012-13 season (winning Maui and at Gonzaga).

But I can even take that a step further. We fell out of the rankings that January (2013) and did not re-enter again. And even though we were ranked during the non-conference the previous three seasons before that (2012, 2011, and 2010), we would always fall out of the rankings by February 1st and never re-enter. So that stretch where we were ranked in February and March of 2020 was the first time we had been ranked that deep into the season since 2009.

Let's go back to that "unranked for 102 consecutive weeks from 2014 to 2020" statistic. I'm writing about the previous five years here, so would you care to guess how many week's we've been ranked since then? We've been ranked in 71 of the 97 polls since January 13, 2020.

0 for 102
~then~
71 of 97

Can you believe it? I seriously can't believe it. I attended 90% of those games those five seasons, both home and away, and I still can't believe it.

But wait. There's more.

It was a similarly big deal when Illinois football entered the AP Poll on October 9, 2022. It was one week short of 11 years since the Illini were last ranked (October 16, 2011). Nearly six years without a basketball ranking and nearly 11 years without a football ranking... and then we check both off the list.

But that's probably not even the best way to frame it. I gave you 0 for 102 and then 71 out of 97 above. Here's a similar one for football:

Weeks ranked in the 20 SEASONS between 2002 & 2021: 13
Weeks ranked in Bret Bielema's first four seasons: 13

We were ranked for three weeks in 2007, five weeks in 2008 (the first five before it all fell apart), and five weeks in 2011 (when we got to 6-0 and then lost six straight). That's it. 13 weeks in 20 years. And now, ranked for five weeks in 2022 followed by eight weeks this season (yes, I'm assuming we'll be ranked in the final poll on Tuesday because, for the first time since 2001, I can rest assured that we'll be ranked in the final poll.)

It's not just about rankings, of course. Here's something I tweeted on December 4th after the 2024 regular season was complete:

As I've said when discussing other Bielema stats, these are the stats during the rebuilding phase. Barry Alvarez was 11-20-1 in the Big Ten his first four years at Wisconsin. Kirk Ferentz was closer (15-17), but still not .500. Even Jeff Brohm was 14-19 in the conference his first four years before turning it on in his fifth season (2021).

When I moved to Champaign in 2020, had you told me that the coach hired in December of 2020 would have 18 conference wins his first four years while Northwestern would have nine, I wouldn't have believed you. If you would have told me that Illinois and Wisconsin would have the exact same conference records from 2021 to 2024 I would have slapped you in the face for lying to me and getting my hopes up.

Actually, I know when I want you to tell me that. Since you have a time machine, set it for October 23, 2020. That's the date of the first Illini sporting event after I had moved to Champaign: the first football game of the Covid season at Wisconsin. When you find me, I'll be all depressed because Wisconsin only had five seats for visiting media in their socially-distanced pressbox and I wasn't picked. My first game to cover in my new career and I'm... watching it at home (at my neighbor's house, actually).

Find me on the sidewalk as I'm walking back from my neighbor's to my house after the game. Tell me that, despite having just watched my team get destroyed by Wisconsin 45-7, cementing that this would be Lovie's last season, the coach hired in less than two months would have the Illini program on equal (or better?) footing than Wisconsin by the end of the 2024 season. I would have pulled the mask down off your face so I could get a good clean punch right to your jaw. Toying with my emotions like that is SO RUDE.

But you wouldn't have been toying. That's where we currently stand. Bret Bielema got Paul Chryst fired in October of 2022 and then the "let's change to Phil Longo's Air Raid offense" experiment failed for Luke Fickell. Wisconsin missed their first bowl in over two decades this season and Fickell is overhauling the roster (24 transfers out, 19 transfers in so far) because he knows he has one year to save it or he's fired.

And Bielema just won 10 games including a bowl game over a 9-3 SEC team. Oh, and he has 18 of the 22 starters from that bowl game returning in 2025. Illini football is poised to go into the 2025 in the preseason rankings and Wisconsin football is in a make-or-break season for their coach.

See that photo at the top? Here, I'll link it for you again. This was just a picture of the State Farm Center as seen from my seats in Memorial Stadium:

That photo is home for me. The football stadium and the basketball arena, right next to each other on a street that I now use every day. I moved here so I could cover games in those two locations. And now the first five years of covering those games have been the best five years (when combining football success + basketball success) since the late 1980's. The 2020's have truly belonged to the Illini.

Which brings The Thing I've Always Said back into view. I had one statement that I used to toss around the old blog all the time. It's what gave me hope during the dark times of the 2010's. I had one goal for my two teams: a Rose Bowl win and a basketball national championship before I die.

In fact, when we did the t-shirts with the 4th & Kirby guys, I had them mock up a t-shirt that said just that. We ended up not making this one, but this was their proposal for the shirt:

The Rose Bowl thing is much trickier now. We'd have to be in the playoff, and we'd have to make the second round of the playoff, and we'd have to be the Big Ten team pre-aligned to end up playing in the Rose Bowl. We could theoretically have the greatest season in Illini football history next year (oh please oh please oh please) and not check off "win a Rose Bowl" from my list.

But I just wanted to close by acknowledging those goals. When my wife and I were sitting at the Effingham TGI Fridays and discussing the move, if I'm honest, I'm not sure I believed we'd ever reach either goal in my lifetime. Six days prior to that meal, we had just returned to the basketball AP Poll for the first time in 5+ years. There's a massive void between "get ranked again" and "win a national title". And football? I had just returned from the Redbox Bowl a few weeks before that meal but I had no designs on a Rose Bowl any time soon.

Now? It's out there again. After these five years, I'm thinking about it again. The "before I die" goals are back on. There's a non-zero chance that we're in the College Football Playoff next season and I keep seeing tweets like this on my timeline:

Did I expect to be here after only five years (and by "here" I mean "a non-zero chance we could accomplish one or the other in the next 365 days")? I did not. For the first 12 years of the blog I had pretty much only covered losing teams. Two of the three-best football teams since 2009 and the three-best basketball teams since 2009 have all come in the last five years.

Two of the three-best football teams since 2009 and the three-best basketball teams since 2009 have all come in the last five years.

Two of the three-best football teams since 2009 and the three-best basketball teams since 2009 have all come in the last five years.

I can hardly believe it.