The 88 Illini: #20-#17

I've gone back and forth over the years regarding the month of August. It was so much simpler when football camp was open and I could just go to practice and then write an article about what I saw at practice. Fall camp was eventually closed off with only "media can see the first 25 minutes of stretching and individual work" available. And because of the requests from the staff that no information be shared publicly, all of my "this player looks ready to make a leap" stuff moved over to practice reports on Slack (where I'd know if PJ Fleck were peeking). Which is probably a good thing as far as me trying to make this a thing. Higher tier of subscription, more information.

I also do this big preview thing (also for the subscribers on the top two tiers). It's the thing I'm "known for" (emphasis on the quotation marks) so I can't not do it. I very much enjoy writing it. But it takes up a lot of my August as well. Last year it reached 37,000 words which is longer than The Old Man And The Sea, Animal Farm, and Of Mice And Men. I didn't quite reach The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe's 38,400 words, however. #goals.

We're also previewing the season on Light The I. Our preview of the offense went up last night and the defense will be up on Friday morning (with a third preview, featuring a certain former Illini offensive lineman, going up next week. That's stealing some of my preview brain this year so I'm trying to balance that as well.

Toss all of that into a bowl, mix it up, and you get a recipe where I finish mowing the lawn last night, talked to a neighbor who was walking by for 12 minutes (he's big into golf and wine), took a shower, ate dinner at 9:00 pm, and then had a very real "do I still have the energy to write the 88 Illini post I planned to write all day?" conversation with myself. I did not.

It results in such a strange way to run a business, if that's what this is. I can see the number of people coming to the site. I know that many people are refreshing, looking for more articles. And it's now been FIVE DAYS since any of the words I've written have ended up here. They're either going on Slack or they're going into a Google Doc (which is where I write the preview). It's August, the season is just over two weeks away, and I go FIVE FREAKING DAYS without anything new on the front page here.

I just finished the document where I write out the details of the final 20 players (so that I don't have to fill out things like "position" and "uniform number" below). I'm all set to rock out these final 20 players in five posts over the next 16 days. And let me assure you, besides things like "it rained six straight days last week I HAVE TO mow the lawn tonight", I've been doing nothing but website/preview/podcast/fire engine for the last nine days. Some days have been 15 hours, no joke.

Yet I STILL haven't put anything on IlliniBoard dot com in five days. I hate it... but it's just my August every year. If I'm going to do a big preview + hide practice notes where PJ Fleck cannot find them + record podcasts + other stuff like taking the fire engine to the Crisis Nursery event this Saturday where kids can climb on it and get pictures taken, this is just how it's all going to be distributed. All I can do is assure you that I'm only doing these things from sun-up to sun-down. I have been non-stop Illini everything since I got back nine days ago. And yes, five of those nine days included just the "#24-#21" post on the front page of this website.

Let's change that.