NERDstats

How To Frame This Season

Holly Birch-Smith - IlliniBoard

I woke up at 3:37 this morning. No idea why. It felt like one of those "the game is today and my brain is too excited to let me sleep" kinds of things. I famously did not sleep at all the night before the Duke game. And I often wake up before my alarm on Saturdays. But I've never done it on a Wednesday.

So I did what any red-blooded American would do when unable to sleep at 3:45 am: I scrolled through Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts on my phone. Just mindlessly scrolling, waiting for the sun to come up. (I eventually fell back asleep around 5:30.)

The algorithm apparently knows that I enjoy videos where some musical artist, while in concert, brings out some other musical artist to surprise the crowd. Examples it has sent me in the past:

Ed Sheeran brings out Eminem to perform Lose Yourself during a concert in Detroit.
Lawrence The Band brings out Gavin Creel to do a set of Broadway tunes (deep cut, that one).
Billie Eilish brings out Armani White to perform... Billie Eilish.
Kane Brown brings out Taylor Swift to perform at some small concert during that Tight End University thing that a bunch of NFL tight ends put on.

This one? The Gangnam Style guy (Psy) brings out (I'm gonna have to look this one up) an artist named Rosé who sings that song you heard everywhere you went this summer: APT. I can barely keep up here – I'm some 52 year-old guy trying to describe a K-Pop artist signing a song about the South Korean drinking game "apateu" – but I'm going to continue charging forward because I have a point.

I'm scrolling through reels and I'm sent a reel that's just the first minute of the video below. You don't have to watch the whole thing. But you do need to watch the first minute. Specifically the moment 19 seconds in when Psy surprises the crowd with Rosé. Don't watch the stage at that moment. Just watch the crowd:

Again, if you missed it, scroll back to 10 seconds and just watch the crowd at the bottom on the first wide shot. Ten thousand people having the same "I can't believe this is real" reaction at the exact same time. This concert was two months ago but I bet those people are still talking about it. This is their thing, and while at their thing, they were surprised with another one of their favorite things.

And that's how I feel. About Saturday. That's how I feel.

I can't believe this is real. I can't believe we're here. I can't believe I get to walk into a sold-out Memorial Stadium on Saturday to watch #17 Illinois vs. #1 Ohio State. Internally, I'm losing my mind like all of those concertgoers above. If we win, I'll tell people about this game for the rest of my life.

That was the simple realization I had in the middle of the night. I see those people go crazy, I have the natural human reaction of "do I ever let myself completely lose my mind like that?", and then I immediately thought of the game this weekend. What's my "I simply cannot believe Psy just brought Rosé out on stage" moment? Well, the trailer for EA Sports College Football '25 showed it 17 months ago: