NIL has made the college football world smaller . players have plenty of money to legally pay for mom & dad to fly up to home AND away games every weekend .Gonna be nice having this family around for nearly a decade ... Amazing family ...
Really hope we don't lose either White or Trimble...especially Trimble - losing an in state four star would be a real stinker...
So, will we at least break even on this? Or will or losses outweigh or gains?
Way too early to say
Money and football wins will cure a lot of this
In other words, same as it ever was.
The Catch-22 this time is that is cannot the same old Illini from the past 30 seasons.
We really need to go on a 10 game winning streak against PU, starting this year with a revenge driven !!! kicking. Last year's game was ridiculous.
I wondered about that too. Seems annoying in a pj fleck kind of way, only more detrimental to Illinois. I have no idea why not, although I’d like to think they know he won’t have much success at Purdue in terms of wins and losses and/or BB and crew just don’t care to waste energy on it. Lose a recruit or a coach, move on and get a new one. He did win the first head to head however the illini did finish with more wins. Just my opinion, but I don’t think he’ll last more than 3, possibly 4 seasons. Maybe it could turn into a rivalry like Bo schembeckler vs woody hayes? Lol
Desmond Straughton.
Thanks! I searched dessy/Bow-Aholics and got the mom/posters name, but it didn't match any of our targets..... Now I gotta go back and figure out just who this kid is, lol. Name is familiar but I'm not recalling any specifics.
Because he committed around the same time as Will Riley. I'm sure you've heard of him. We are Illinois!Thanks! I searched dessy/Bow-Aholics and got the mom/posters name, but it didn't match any of our targets..... Now I gotta go back and figure out just who this kid is, lol. Name is familiar but I'm not recalling any specifics.
Prolly not just the ‘25 class.
Recruiting has not been what it needs to be to perform above .500 on a regular basis IMO. Only gonna get tougher if the NIL $$ are not there. Coming in I think coach B’s plan was to build and develope, but with NIL being a big part of recruitment now there’s a good chance many players may not stick around to be developed. I think he and his staff can coach, but recruiting has not been strong enough.
That's the case everywhere. Players are NOT staying a full 4 years. It's to the point they might stay 2 years and then hit the portal.
Our talent deficit to the teams we would need to beat in order to get the boost of engagement with the program that we're always hoping for is as big as it has ever been.
So there needs to be more NIL $$ to compete stronger in the portal and if the funds aren’t there…….same as it ever was.
And once momentum is lost, it's really hard to get it back even if the NIL dollars did start flowing at the necessary level. Unfortunately, it takes something big like a coaching change to get recruits to start putting their faith in a program and believe that it will be significantly better in the future than what it is today. I'm not advocating that, but that's what it typically takes to change the "momentum perspective." For now, I'm still going to have faith that we can land a few big ones. I like parts of what we have. It just needs to be filled out soon.
