Five Trips Around The Sun

I officially launched the new version of IlliniBoard five years ago this past Wednesday. Why September 17th? Because on September 16th, 2020, the Big Ten finally announced that they would play a shortened football season. And after sitting on my hands for six months, I could finally start my new career.

It had been sitting, waiting to launch, for exactly six months. From March 17th to September 17th. My last day at my job in St. Louis was Valentine's Day in 2020, I spent a month getting ready to launch the new subscription format for the site (while also getting the St. Louis condo ready to sell), the launch day was set for March 17th, and then Covid came along. So we scrapped the launch and I sat on my hands (while also writing articles for my friend's travel website just to make some money) before finally launching the day after the Big Ten said "fine, we'll play a season."

That means this is probably a good spot for the "if you're planning to renew again and your credit card changed in the last year..." paragraph since so many renewals will happen in the next two weeks.

If you're planning to renew again and your credit card changed in the last year – whether that was a card that expired or you had a lost card – click the "Account" button in the top right corner (if you're on your phone you'll have to spin it sideways to see the Account button) and update your card information there. It saves us the whole "you get an email saying the auto-renew failed because your card is expired but you don't see it and then the subscription cancels 14 days later and you try to go to the site one day and you can't get in and you email me to see what's up and I look up your account to find that it expired because you had changed credit cards back in February and then we have to reboot your subscription" dance. Just a simple check and "yep, that card is current" saves me a ton of busy work (if you're planning to let the auto-renew do its thing).

OK, with that out of the way... five years. Anyone want a list of what our Illini lives were like five years ago?

• Lovie Smith was three months from being fired. The first game of the Covid-shortened 2020 season – a 45-7 loss at Wisconsin where we made Graham Mertz look like a Heisman candidate – was the official "it's over" moment. Any possible carryover from a bowl season in 2019 evaporated that Friday night in Madison.
• Basketball had still not been to the NCAA Tournament since the very beginning of Obama's second term (March of 2013). We were all claiming that 2020 should have counted – we were #21 in the polls when Covid shut down the season – but technically, on September 17th, 2020 when we put up the "this is Robert's full time job now" version of IlliniBoard, it had been 2,734 days since we had played an NCAA Tournament game.
• Women's basketball? I'll just list the nine seasons before Shauna Green: 9-21, 15-16, 9-21, 9-21, 9-22, 10-20, 11-19, 5-18, 7-20. The three seasons with Shauna Green? 22-10, 19-15, 22-10. Expanding it a little further, one single winning season between 2010-11 and 2021-22 and then three straight since (including two NCAA Tournament appearances and a WBIT title).

I could expand this list to include other sports but I want to focus on the three main revenue sports here. I really need you to understand just how far we've come in just five years. Yes, we talk about it all the time, and I wrote a similar post back in January as I was approaching five years in Champaign. But... I just need you to look at the data again.

Let's start with football attendance. 2020 obviously had no attendance data because of Covid, so I'll add in 2018 and 2019 for context:

2018: 36,151 
2019: 36,587 
2021: 35,347 
2022: 43,048
2023: 49,698
2024: 54,750

2025? We know that the next two games are sold out so we know that the average attendance for the first four (of seven) games will be 59,513. 35,347 in 2021, 59,513 so far in 2025. Twenty four thousand additional fans.

Women's basketball is experiencing the same thing. Let's just use the same timeframe from above (excluding 2020-21, obviously):

2017-18: 1,386
2018-19: 1,511 
2019-20: 1,574 
2021-22: 1,237
2022-23: 3,486
2023-24: 3,729
2024-25: 4,967

With season tickets for WBB nearly selling out the entire lower bowl (if the lower bowl isn't sold out already), 2025-26 will be even higher.

Men's basketball? Every year for Brad Underwood:

2017-18: 12,614
2018-19: 12,935 
2019-20: 13,041 
2021-22: 14,690
2022-23: 15,091
2023-24: 14,990
2024-25: 15,091

I feel like that number sometimes isn't fully understood. Iowa? Average attendance 9,161. Ole Miss in a Sweet 16 season last year? 8,156 per game. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State? 6,945 and 5,937, respectively. Illinois? 15,091.

Again, none of this was in place in 2020. When I told Brumby "go" on transferring everything over to the new website five years ago yesterday, football was averaging 35,000 fans, basketball was averaging 13,000 fans, and women's basketball was averaging 1,500 fans. Football hadn't had a winning season since 2011, basketball hadn't been to the tournament since 2013, and women's basketball had seven consecutive losing seasons, the majority of them single digit wins.

I feel like that might surprise some people. It certainly surprised me. The foundations were being put in place, but nothing had happened yet on September 17, 2020. I launched the new version of the website to a fanbase that hadn't had anything to hang its hat on in nearly a decade.

Since?

• Illini Football has been ranked for 36 weeks since the start of the 2001 season. 25 seasons, only 36 weeks ranked. EIGHTEEN of those 36 weeks in the polls have happened between 2022 and today.
• Illini Basketball went 1,869 days without appearing in the AP Top 25 from December 6, 2014 to January 18, 2020. From January 18, 2020 to the last AP Poll before the NCAA Tournament on March 17, 2025 (1,885 days), we've been ranked in 75 of the 107 Top-25 polls. 1,869 days, not a single appearance in over 100 polls. 1,885 days after finally being ranked, 75 of the 107 polls.
• Illini Women's Basketball has perhaps the best stat of them all. Illini WBB total wins across seven seasons from 2015-16 to 2021-22: 60. Illini WBB total wins in Shauna Green's three seasons: 63.

HALF of the AP Poll appearances for Illini Football in the last 25 seasons have happened in the last four years. January 18th, 2020 is the halfway point between the poll that came out in December of 2014 and the poll that came out in March of 2025 and we went from zero rankings in the first HALF to seventy five rankings in the second HALF. And of all Illini women's basketball wins the last 10 seasons, more than HALF have come in Shauna Green's three seasons.

Checkmate. Game-set-match. Vince Carter "it's over" dot gif. Game, blouses.

Again, all of this has happened just in the last five years. Everything has changed since that moment you clicked on IlliniBoard.com and the site suddenly looked different. 11+ years of me blogging and having absolutely nothing good to write about and now, in only five years of me doing this full time, all of that.

Let's write this final paragraph together. You already know what I'm going to say. Type it out in your head before I do. ALL OF THAT in the last five years?

The 20's Belong To The Illini.