Latest

Where Do We Stand - January 21st

Here's the thing. I know that it's "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" but I don't know what "it" is. I know it's not the Theory Of Relativity but I think it might

Real Time Back & Forth

Here's the background. As I was heading out of Breslin, I saw a tweet from Tyler. He had just finished watching the game on tape delay and was reacting in real-time to what he had just seen. How he felt about the game and how I felt about

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

Yoyo

If the plan for this season is "struggle at the beginning of the season, yoyo back and forth between solid performances and shaky performances in the middle of the season, and then really get on a roll at the end of the season", we're right on

The Should vs. Did Crisis

That's it - I'm calling it a crisis. It's a crisis. We're at a pivot point and it cannot pivot in the direction it's been trending. Logic must be applied. Understanding must be reached. (Yes, it's fully basketball

What Can You Say?

We hosted a dinner party tonight. So I got home from the game, shoveled snow, helped clean the house, and then we had people here from 6:00 to 11:00. My wife went to bed, I grabbed my laptop, I sat down here at the end of the kitchen

Where Do We Stand? January 10th

Back-to-back NERDstat posts. The final football one and now the second basketball one. I haven't updated the basketball I-N-I since I left for Florida but now that I'm back in snowy Illinois, let's take a look at Where We Stand. Spoiler: we stand in

So Maybe Just One More

I said that I was done NERDstatting for football. But then we won the Citrus Bowl. And I'll I've done for the last week is look at the NERDstats as they updated to see where we'd land after beating South Carolina. It's

Let It Snow

I'm a snow guy. I get excited when there's a snowstorm approaching. If there's ever snow in the forecast and suddenly the rain/snow line moves to where I'm getting rain and 20 miles north gets snow, I want to move 20

Citrus Bowl VIX: You Had To Be There

I'm still not home yet. We planned to split the drive into two days, and with the snow, we decided to extend our night in Chattanooga into the next afternoon so that the plows have plenty of time to clear the interstates in Illinois. We're leaving

Escaped The Trap

The Big Ten basketball schedule comes at you pretty fast. With apologies to Ferris Bueller, in no way should you stop and look around once in a while. The better advice - especially in January - is to keep looking forward. You lay a historic beat down on #9 Oregon

Citrus Bowl VIII: 2025 Depth Chart

I'm still down here in Florida so these are technically Citrus Bowl posts. Well, not the basketball articles, but if it's a football post, until I leave sunny Florida for snowy Illinois, it's gonna get the "Citrus Bowl + Roman numeral" treatment. With

I'm Lovin' It

Bah dah bah bah bah. Let's start with this. I wasn't there. Tyler wasn't there. We broke our 3-year streak of either him or me covering a game in person last March when I had to leave Omaha to attend to a personal matter

Illini Power Rankings: 2,143 Miles Just For Some Guy Named Gene

Exactly two days after I graduated from the University of Illinois in May 1997, my father and I packed up my 1993 Toyota Camry and drove across the country to Los Angeles, where I was scheduled, one week later, to start a job at U. The National College Magazine. Older