The 88 Illini: #12-#9

Can I write out some of my injury concerns here? I'm going to write out some of my injury concerns here before getting to the next four players on the list. The fact that two of the players who will miss the opener (per Tuesday's press conference) are players who I've still yet to cover on The 88 Illini, well, that's not great, Bob.

Here's Coach Bielema's words yesterday:

So, two of the top 10 players on my list will miss the opener. And the player who is #10 below gets a scary "week three, week four" reference there. I'm not going to panic. I'm not going to panic. I'm not going to panic.

Whenever you have a roster overhaul like this, anchors are important. And those anchors can be returning players or, in this new era, upperclassman transfers. I've been talking about Platt since seeing him catch passes at Luke Altmyer's Pro Day in March and Daniel Brown has been mentioned by the coaches as perhaps the player who will benefit the most from this scheme change. And now we're going to head into the season, at least for the first game, without two of our anchors.

Maybe I can calm myself with the fact that we're not learning of season-ending injuries (like Matthew Bailey in 2023 or Xavier Scott last year). We could reach the first Big Ten game with all of the anchors in place and then I'm really worrying about nothing here. I could even spin it as "a few missed games in September from a few starters allows for the backups to get important reps."

But still, we added Alex Perry and Jayshon Platt to the receiving corps as plug-and-play transfers and now Perry will miss most (if not all) of the season and Platt might be week three or four. I waved-off injury concerns at the start of August and now that we're approaching the end of August... I'm not feeling the best.

I'm not going to panic. I'm not going to panic. I'm not going to panic. Deep breaths, Robert. Just focus on writing the next four.