The top eighteen players on The 90 Illini this year: 17% Canadian. Chase & Sydney Brown are from London, Ontario and Isaiah Adams is from Ajax (a suburb of Toronto). There's also a punter from Australia and an offensive lineman from Denmark, so we've got the international thing going for us.

Adams had this crazy journey to Champaign. He starts his college football journey at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. Their football field didn't fit inside their track:

He plays two years at Laurier (one the Canadian version of a redshirt year), but in June of 2020, Canada cancels all fall sports. So he transfers to Garden City Community College in Kansas. But they push their season to the spring. He plays a shortened spring season (didn't count towards eligibility), a full fall season, and then signs with Illinois.

So if you're scoring at home, that's high school in the Toronto suburbs to a small university 90 miles west of there and then a junior college in far western Kansas and finally a Big Ten school in Champaign.

Maybe the NFL needs to add that team in London so that can be his next move.

18. Isaiah Adams

Offensive Lineman
Uniform number: 78
Year in school: Junior (without the Covid waiver, 1 year to play 1; with the Covid waiver, technically 2 years to play 2)
Height: 6'-5" -- Weight: 315 lbs.
Hometown: Ajax, Ontario
High School: McClellan Catholic HS
Transfer From: Garden City CC
Five best offers: Minnesota, Texas Tech, West Virginia, Colorado, Arizona
Tom Cruise rating:

Background

Adams was fairly highly recruited for a juco. Eight P5 offers plus several more G5 schools had offered. I guess I should say nine P5 offers since UCF technically becomes a P5 school soon. Of course, with Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC and USC/UCLA moving to the Big Ten, by the time I might start calling UCF a "Power Five school" it might just be a "Power Two" and a "Little Eight".

I'm off track. This is supposed to be about Isaiah Adams' background. I covered his journey above so I'll just say that he was a First Team Juco All-American at Garden City. And in the 247 Composite rankings, he was ranked 4th with the three juco offensive tackles ahead of him all 4-stars. The college destinations for those three: Penn State, Oklahoma State, and Mississippi State. So Adams is not a juco OL recruit like we saw throughout the 2010's. He was very highly regarded.

2022 Outlook

Even though he was listed as an offensive tackle on those juco lists, and even though that's him at left tackle in the spring game in the photo up at the top, at practice on Saturday he was at left guard. With Julian Pearl back from his spring thumb injury, Pearl took over at left tackle and Adams moved to left guard.

So the outlook here is simple: I'd like for Isaiah Adams and Julian Pearl to go all Wonder Twins playing next to each other this fall so that next season they become the best left side of our offensive line since Martin O'Donnell and Xavier Fulton in 2007.

Easy peasy.