Ask Your Illinois Questions

Tough to say on Juice, since everything gets filtered through coachspeak/spring optimism. The offense, including Juice, looked great at an open scrimmage the team held near Chicago, then stunk at the official spring game. However, there were some mitigating circumstances there (winds of about 40MPH, plus the defense knew that the QBs weren't ever going to keep the ball on option reads). The problem isn't his working- he's always been a hard worker- it's because he was unbelievably raw in high school, and Chicago Public School athletes are trained and coached very poorly. Weakest part of the quad is the outside of the defense: DEs, outside linebackers, and CBs. The middle should be fairly strong- not great, but middle of the Big 10. Besides from doug Pilcher, who is a 5th year senior at DE, there's going to be a lot of very young players everywhere else. Given that these positions were weaknesses last year, I don't see a ton of grounds for optimism. The two outside linebacker positions in particular are worrisome. Realistically, I see 8-4 or 9-3. Vegas has Illinois at 7.5, but you need to pay $150 to win $100 on the over, so 8 seems closer to the truth. The team was probably a 6 or 7 win team ability-wise last year that happened to go 5-7 (they were probably a 7 or 8 win team the year before that, and happened to go 9-3).

Extremely. Sitting at work.

Depends upon what you mean. Most girls in Bloomington in September-May are from Chicago, or at least the suburbs, so there's probably not much difference (except for the fact that Bloomington is a college town, so you get the "WOOO!!! College!!1!" atmosphere). I'll say Bloomington in the winter and Chicago in the summer.

I don't the discipline to update something regularly enough to have an e-blog. I just DVR the games during the season and keep paper notebooks on the individual plays. Low-tech, doesn't take terribly long (and I enjoy it), and afterwards I generally know what happened on any given play during the season; I also have an idea on who is being overrated/underrated by everyone else. I've thought of transferring everything online, but that sounds like a chore, and I don't want it to turn into a chore.

Sheesh... can't say. I don't so specific score predictions. Vegas says Illinois -7... that might be a little high. I think something in the 4-6 point range is about right, especially given the game being in Champaign. In fairness to Michigan, I think they're the 4th best team in the Big 10, behind OSU, Illinois, and Iowa, and in front of PSU.

I didn't know it was possible to hate Minnesota. They are the team I invariably forget when trying to count the 11 teams in the Big 10. As for the Illinois/Michigan "rivalry", I don't know if it's really even considered much of a rivalry at Illinois anymore. There is a lot of hatred of Bo Schembechler for reasons too arcane to go into here. A lot of Illinois fans think they were screwed in 2000 as well. Most of that is water under the bridge though. I will say that (speaking in generalities) the Michigan fans that travel to Illinois games have, overall, been douchier than most team fans. That seems to be a general consensus amongst most people I've talked to. The odd part is that people were very nice the one time I went up to Ann Arbor, but Michigan fans carry that reputation on a lot of campuses. Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's true of all Michigan fans, and every team has their jerk fans (I sat in front of 4 of the most obnoxious people I've ever met at the Illinois/Northwestern game last year, and they were Illini fans). If you were to ask most Illinois fans who they most want to beat year in and year out, you'd probably hear Iowa more than anyone else, partly once again because of the fanbase, and partly because of some bad history between the two programs.

I actually know this one, because it was bothering me once. It's a shortening of the phrase "have sand in your craw". I've heard the phrase "stuck in your craw" before, but this one must have died away, as did the shortened phrase "have sand", although, interestingly, a somewhat more, er, modern phrase has developed (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sand%20in%20your%20pussy). It means feisty or aggressive, something like playing with a chip on your shoulder. I guess other cliches have simply had more staying power.

That's the million dollar question about the schedule. I don't know how much I buy into momentum or any of that, but starting 1-4 (which is a little to realistic of a possibility) would be a major blow, even if the team could still be plausibly favored in the last seven games. Of course, the other side of that is that if the team starts 4-1 or (unlikely, of course) 5-0, they may run away with the Big 10. It'll be an interesting test case. As for the mental toughness, there was a win against a decent Iowa team in there, so I'm not really sure. The only game I can really point to and say that it didn't seem like the team was completely into it was the Northwestern game, but then again, Northwestern was pretty decent last year, so maybe it was just a good defense.

1.) The NCAA answer is that FSU got the Seminole tribe to agree while Illinois couldn't get the fig leaf. The more likely answer is that FSU is a major player in college athletics and Illini is a mid-tier power, so if you're going to show off your PC bonafides, best to do it where it won't hurt too badly. It's really a shame; the undergrad vote always ran about 70-30 for the chief, and in honesty, Chief Illiniwek and the 3-in-1 at halftime was one of the few distinctive things about Illinois football. Now we're just Purdue without the giant drum or train whistle, or (shudder) Indiana. 2.) I've read the site for a couple of years now. I read a lot of the Big 10 sites, but most of them stink, and this one is very good. 3.) 95% he's going pro.