Stream Of Consciousness - EIU

How is the season starting tomorrow? I know that a Thursday start is only two days earlier than a Saturday start, but it feels like two weeks. I am, in no way, prepared for the season to start. Here's hoping no one on the team feels the same.

If you're new here (who would be new here?), every Friday (er, Wednesday) night before the game I write the SOC. The Stream Of Consciousness. I've done it for 15 years now. And there's one main rule: no backspace button. I write and then I publish. You will see typos. You will see words misspelled. You will see incomplete thoughts. Write, then predict the score, then publish.

The first SOC of the season always has two parts: season prediction and game prediction. This one will have three parts: season prediction, game prediction, and "here's a completely lame attempt to finish The 90 Illini. We'll start with that one.

The 90 Illini, Numbers 26 Through 1

See that fire truck up there? That's Engine 77, our new tailgating vehicle. "Our" doesn't mean IlliniBoard. "Our" means my tailgating crew. Six of us went in on the purchase and transformation of an old green fire truck into Engine 77.

Given my design background, I was in charge of coordinating the transformation (paint, graphics, etc). GD Squared (they're in Chicago) did the design work and all I had to do was coordinate it all. Which sounds fun, but, like, have you ever picked out automotive paint? Ever chosen a paint based on samples sprayed on top of three different primers?

It wasn't really difficult, it was just time consuming. Just the phone calls to Springfield to figure out how to put license plates on a decommissioned fire truck took forever. But we picked her up yesterday, and you'll see Engine 77 in Lot 31 for the next 30 years. We have a lot planned for it.

But it also meant that my writing in the last two weeks was pretty much The IlliniBoard Football Preview and that's it (which, well, I couldn't figure out how to link that here like I used to and charge $10 so it only went to those upper tier subscribers. Which means that the site has just been crickets for two weeks. It's amazing, right? I'm doing "Illini stuff" 12-16 hours per day for weeks and the website – the thing at the core of my Illini stuff – has cobwebs. People who don't know anything about the preview (56 pages, single-spaced) probably think I've just sitting around watching TikTok videos the last two weeks and not publishing anything on the site.

Not the case. Preview came out great. Fire truck came out great. The 90 Illini... stalled out at #27.