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The 88 Illini: #56-#53

Do you want to know the biggest shift in my life the last six months? No, it's not "my football team beat another SEC team in a bowl game and my basketball team went to the Final Four." It's being on campus once or

The 88 Illini: #60-#57

Now we are reaching the numbers I think you'll see on the field. Maybe it's only some lineman you'll see on extra points and field goals, but I'm pretty sure these sixty Illini will see action at some point. I always say

The 88 Illini: #64-#61

If you're sitting there and you're like "Robert, where are #68 through #65 because I keep a chart of the entire 88 Illini with individual magnets on my refrigerator and just this morning my six year-old son swapped out Michael McDonough and Connor Sullivan

The Cauldron

As far as Things To Write About go, I'm not sure I can remember a time like this. Yes, there's always something to write about, but... let me see if I can explain this. I only write with my fan brain. In late 2008 I decided

The 88 Illini: #68-#65

I just did it again. I looked up the next four players on my list, I thought "there's no way all four of these players are in the 60's", I went back through the entire list from 1 to 68 and... I couldn'

The 88 Illini: #72-#69

I mean, just look at that picture. It's from the Ohio State game last October. Some may look at it and say "so what? The seats near the 50 are full even when there are only 32,000 fans in the stands." But that's

The 88 Illini: #76-#73

I can write whatever I want in these intros and I'm choosing to write about Keaton Wagler being drafted 5th overall last night. Yes, this is a football post, and I'll eventually get the next four players on the list. But first, let's talk

Alibi

I've been many people since I saw you last Every one a little closer to my very best This post has absolutely nothing to do with Illini anything. It's one of those "I need to get this out so I can clear the cache and

One Question Mailbag: SP+ Predictions

As I said in the last post, I feel like I'm starting to get a better feel for the 2026 football team. I'm not there yet – if I had to write the preview tomorrow it would just be a bunch of guesses – but I'm

The 88 Illini: #80-#77

For whatever reason, I have a very strong "now it begins" feeling this morning. Perhaps it was all of the photos on social media of the first basketball practice yesterday. Perhaps it's the knowledge that the football players (including the summer enrollees) are on campus and

The 88 Illini: #84-#81

I'm just a boy, standing in front of a reader, asking them to understand just how hard it has been to assemble this list in 2026. I could start every one of these posts with some form of "this is impossible" but I still wouldn'

Max-Out

Assembling the 88 Illini list has me thinking one single thought the last 72 hours. I can't get said thought out of my head which means I need to write about it. The thought: I'm not sure everyone understands the current football roster building methodology. So

The 88 Illini - #88-#85

This will be, without question, the most difficult list I've assembled. And I've been doing this since 2010. I guess I could say that I've been doing this since 2009 since that summer I put together a list of the top-50 players on

One Question Mailbag: My Favorite Part

We took some mailbag questions on the podcast last week (and this week). We didn't get to this question but I really wanted to get to this question so now I'm going to get to this question. Because my favorite part of this is answering questions