Where Do We Stand? February 13th

It's fairly amazing how the intensity of a "rivalry" dies down when one team is awful. Two years ago today, a matchup with Michigan would make your phone feel warm when you picked it up just from the chirping back and forth between Michigan fans and Illinois fans on Twitter. Now, we play Michigan in seven hours (from when I'm typing these words) and it's dead silent. A few photoshops of Underwood holding Howard in his lap like a child are blowing across Twitter like tumbleweeds and that's it.

I put rivalry in quotes there because it's not a real rivalry. When Michigan pulled the "we can't return to play yet because it's not safe for our athletes" routine (while the women's team played that night) in 2021, it heated up to 211 degrees. But now, Hunter Dickinson wouldn't even recognize the Illini-Michigan Twitter battlefield. Nobody is there.