Cornfields

I'm starting this post in Leverett. I'm on the evening train bound for Chicago and Big Ten Media Days tomorrow morning. Leverett isn't really a town. It's the grain elevators and maybe two houses along the train tracks north of Champaign but south of Thomasboro. I'll pause right here and take a picture of what I see out my window and then I'll use that photo as the featured photo at the top of this post. Sorry if it's blurry but I'm going 79 mph on Amtrak at the moment.

There we go. A cornfield just north of Leverett and just south of Thomasboro. After taking the photo and uploading it, I'm almost to Rantoul now. So in about 45 seconds I'll be able to see the athletic fields where Camp Rantoul was held. There is no feeling in my heart like the warmth I feel when I see the fields of Camp Rantoul on a muggy summer evening. I'll miss it forever.

See that cornfield right there? The one in the photo with the corn just starting to tassel? I've had such an interesting relationship with cornfields. And central Illinois. This is my story, this is my song:

I grew up in a small town in southern Illinois. 7,000 people then; 10,000 people now. We were only 29 miles from the Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium but it wasn't a suburban upbringing. The county fair was in my town. My first job was at a Christmas tree farm. My father and grandfather were the optometrists in town; they knew everyone and everyone knew them.

So when I see a cornfield, I go back there. Riding bikes near the edge of town. Driving to the orchard to get apples. And, if you had a dad cool enough to drive over to Missouri and buy fireworks, bottle rocket wars among the rows of corn at your friend's grandfather's farm. (One particular bottle rocket war ended when I blew a hole in the sleeve of my friend Aaron's light blue Fighting Illini shirt. When kids light bottle rockets and throw them at each other, shirts get hurt.)

When I got to Champaign for my freshman year, I was hit square in the jaw with CHICAGO. It was the center of everyone's world besides mine. Nearly everyone on my dorm floor grew up within an hour of the Sears Tower. Within my first month on campus I was introduced to the South-of-I-80 concept: Once the cornfields begin just south of Monee, "Southern Illinois" begins.

Being not-from-Chicagoland is a very real thing on campus. 80% of the student body has this certain way-of-life and you're on the outside looking in. It's not anyone's fault, of course. It's just this very simple "we all grew up this way; you grew up that way." And yet, the campus itself feels very... not Chicago. We'll come back to that.

I don't want you to hear what I'm saying as some kind of "St. Louis vs. Chicago" Cards/Cubs thing. It's just a numbers game. The state of Illinois has 12.7 million people and more than three-quarters of those people live in metro Chicago. The heat map for the state has one single hot zone: high and inside to a right-handed hitter.

Upon graduation, I moved back to the St. Louis area. On the Missouri side of the river this time. As I began to discuss Illini athletics on this fledgling message board called IlliniBoard in the summer of 2000 (Year 27 begins later this week), I found myself wrapped into that dynamic. One of the earliest message board themes back in the early 2000's: we cannot be the downstate school - we need to embrace Chicago. We had been to the Elite Eight and the Sugar Bowl in 2001 and we needed to use that to connect the campus to all the fans in Chicago.

I can even remember supporting the argument that the radio broadcast should get away from the corn and soybean seed advertisements because it turned off the fans we were targeting north of I-80. The old Mike Royko column ("where do Illini fans park their tractors when they attend a game at Northwestern?") would get dragged out again and off we'd go. If we wanted to capture Chicago, we had to capture Chicago media, and if we wanted to capture Chicago media, we needed to abandon the South Farms (both literally and figuratively).

I'm older now. Wiser. My worldview has changed. The answer to "how do we capture Chicago media?" turned out to be "newspapers will die off and the ones that survive won't even try to cover specific college teams anymore." Big Ten Media Day tomorrow is more about podcasts than newspapers. There maybe isn't even a "Chicago media" to embrace anymore.

And I'm not sure I care as much? I'm not sure it matters. The answer to "where does the financial support come from?" is less geographic now. And, as a central Illinois resident again for the past 6+ years, my relationship with those cornfields has changed as well. Let me see if I can describe this.

I first touched on this after one of Brad Underwood's Coaches vs. Cancer fundraisers a few years ago. The event is held every year at Gordyville USA, a livestock auction complex between Rantoul and Gifford. There's a dirt floor. Coach Underwood tells stories about showing animals at county fairs. Bill Self and Lon Kruger were his guests on the stage that night, and I was struck by how similar those three coaches (and Lou Henson) were. All four men were born in small towns in eastern Kansas or eastern Oklahoma. And they fit in Champaign seemlessly.

(I asked Coach Underwood about this on a podcast episode a few months ago. Here was his answer.)

That set my brain on a journey where it continues today. A journey from "we need to think outside central Illinois" to "we need to BE central Illinois." I'll give you another example.

Five friends and I bought a fire engine (have you heard?). It's our tailgate vehicle. It's orange and blue in all the right places. Because I'm the only one of the six owners who lives in Champaign and the fire engine is stored in Champaign, I'm the driver. I'm the "go get the oil changed" guy. I'm the guy who drives it in parades.

Because of that, I sometimes get this experience. Here's a video I took back in June when I was driving it to the storage facility after getting some work done. There's no sound here besides the sound of a country road north of Champaign. It's just me bathing in Illini perfection:

In that moment, I'm floating across that country road. The corn needs to be a little higher for the true "back in high school driving to my friend's house out in the country" feeling, but I'm still floating. I am A) driving this massive rolling billboard which celebrates my college team (a school that just produced a Music City Bowl win over Tennessee and a Final Four) while also B) driving through cornfields that speak to my upbringing like the words of a country song (and I don't even listen to country music).

There's a purity to all of this. I was thinking about it while sitting at the press conference this morning (the one announcing the jersey-patch partnership with Busey Bank). An athletic director who grew up in Indiana and, despite his NFL-past and ability to put the power in power suit, feels quite comfortable drihome through cornfields. A football coach who grew up doing chores on the hog farm in Prophetstown. A basketball coach who speaks publicly about the cattle he owns with friends in Macomb.

I was in that mindset when I flipped through some messages on our Slack channel and saw a question about Busey Bank being the jersey patch sponsor. "Isn't it basically an east central Illinois bank?" was the question. Wisconsin will have Culver's on their jersey and Arkansas will have Tyson Foods - isn't Busey Bank maybe a little too local?

No. I think it's perfect.

First off, I'm sure friend-of-IlliniBoard (and Busey Executive Vice President) Martin O'Donnell would want me to tell you that they have 80 branches and do business in 10 states. They bought a bank in St. Louis several years ago and the closest bank to my Central West End condo in St. Louis was a Busey Bank. Josh Whitman noted at the press conference that when he was an intern at Busey Bank in the summers of 1998 and 1999, their book was $1 billion and now it's $18 billion. This is not your father's Busey Bank and that's why they're seeking partnerships like this.

But more importantly, they're as Champaign as Jimmy Johns (headquartered here) and Kraft Mac & Cheese (produced on North Mattis). Twenty years ago, I would have advocated for a jersey-patch sponsor that would have serenaded Chicago. Today, I want a jersey sponsor that has a banker who would have called on Arnie and Marilyn Bielema's hog farm.

That's what I'm experiencing when I drive the fire engine through some Illinois cornfields. This is not Iowa and this is not Indiana. It's not anywhere close to Wisconsin or Minnesota. This is central Illinois. For honest labor and for learning we stand.

I'm being clever there, but that's it, right? We are a land grant university for the people of the great state of Illinois. Jacksonville was considered, Bloomington was considered, Lincoln was considered, but they landed on Champaign-Urbana. In 1874, seven years after the university was founded, back when it was still Illinois Industrial University (and decades before athletic teams were a thing), the name of the student newspaper was changed from "The Student" to "The Illini" - a term they were using to describe the people of the region.

And this rebirth of Illini athletics in the 2020's has come from people who fit that description. It was so evident sitting there today. Josh Whitman's magic elixir when hiring a coach seems to be finding someone who understands what "Illini" means. In the "1874 student editorial announcing the new name" sense:

I really do believe in this stuff. It took me a long time, but I feel like I truly get it now. I really do take lyrics like "for honest labor and for learning we stand" to heart. I want to honor the student who wrote "shall generation after generation pass and find unfailing stores of richness and worth?" I want the world to understand what Il-li-ni truly means.

Which brings me back to cornfields. No, not the "why does the corn in Illinois lean to the east" joke. Not the cornfield at the center of campus that is "the oldest experimental cornfield in the country." Not the one out my window earlier just north of Leverett. Just... cornfields.

Maybe snobby Northwestern fans are right. We're just a campus out in the cornfields. And sure, maybe cornfield-adjacent Kansas was correct in choosing a cryptocurrency company as their jersey patch sponsor while we're going with a bank headquartered in Champaign. Perhaps the secret to Michigan's success is the direct tie-in to Detroit money and we'll always be a step behind until Chicago sends its riches our way (once we replace the cornfields with AI-generated skylines). Maybe we're not thinking big enough.

Or maybe we've been reborn by sourcing back to our roots. An athletic director who left West Lafayette's William Henry Harrison High School for the Land of Lincoln, a basketball coach who identified Illinois as his dream job when he was looking across all those cornfields from his ten year stint as an assistant coach in Macomb, and a football coach born in Illini Hospital. Mike Small (from Danville) built our most successful program the last 20 years inside a practice facility literally shaped like the south farms round barns and Shauna Green grew up in Clinton, Iowa looking across the Mississippi River at the cornfields of Illinois (only 25 miles away from the Bielema farm). These are our roots and this is where we're growing.

I'm in Chicago now. Got off the train and walked to my hotel room. I stopped as I crossed over the river and took this picture:

That's gorgeous. This is a world-class city. Illinois truly has it all, from my bottle rocket war in the rows of corn to this epic view. My point is not in any way "screw Chicago, this is a downstate school". The 9.6 million people in this metro area are make up our financial lifeblood. The numbers are there to make us a world-class athletic department.

My point is Il-li-ni. The broad green plains that nourish our land. The choice to put the land grant university for the Prairie State deep in the prairie. When you're around this current group of coaches and athletic administrators, like I was today, you can't help but feel like we're operating from the center of our ethos. I sat there thinking through the small towns where the senior ADs came from (Marty Kaufmann, Jacksonville; Bobbi Busboom, St. Joseph; Dr. Brian Russell, Lakeville, Indiana; Tom Michael, Carlyle) and the small towns where our coaches came from (listed above) and I started to wonder if understanding bottle rocket wars in a cornfield was a requirement to join the squad.

And then I got on the train and I looked out across the cornfields after a soaking thunderstorm. I was only looking at it, but I could smell it. It immediately sends me to this "old Princeton yells her Tiger, Wisconsin her Varsity..." place where I understand our unique place in the college landscape. We are the land grant university built on the extremely flat prairies of central Illinois. Colorado has their view of the Flatirons and Wisconsin is on a lake and Pepperdine is perched above the Malibu beaches but none of them are for me. Give me the flattest campus in the land with perfect grass fields for tailgating and a concrete spaceship rising out of the prairie.

And cornfields.