whitesoxfan99

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Oct 7, 2014 -> 02:28 PM) Of course illini basketball has higher expectations. We're talking about Illini football fans though. Half of them defend Ron freaking Zook, generally regarded as an awful coach by the rest of the sane world, like he's their own first born. Hell this whole discussion started because illinois fans think they might have a shot at a guy from one of the worst programs in the country and whose resume includes a 10-19 mark as a head coach. How is that having too high of expectations? Agreed. The expectations for the football program amongst Illinois fans is actually really low (thank you 20 years of horrendous head coaches). The people who think we should have kept Zook don't recognize that he had stopped recruiting and that we were going to be horrible under him going forward. Propping up Zook with decent assistants resulted in a couple very mediocre seasons and really in 2011 while the final record looked solid, that team finished tied for 2nd to last in the Big 10. And Zook had those mediocre season with a lot of NFL talent. Without that NFL talent? We were looking at some terrible seasons. That doesn't excuse Thomas for hiring Beckman (and I wish he would have cut bait on Beckman after year 1) but I don't understand the people who wanted to retain Zook for going 6-6 with NFL talent when there was no talent in the pipeline. The 2010-2012 classes were horrendous and if Zook isn't recruiting he literally has 0 value as a coach.

QUOTE (knightni @ Oct 7, 2014 -> 02:01 PM) Illinois is probably the worst college football job in the Big 10. Too many unreasonable expectations from the alumni. Wisconsin, Michigan, Penn St, Nebraska, and Ohio St. have winning history. Northwestern, Minnesota, Purdue, Rutgers, Maryland and Indiana are just happy to be successful sometimes. Iowa , Michigan St. and Illinois are the only schools that have tasted success and think they can get it every year. Iowa and Michigan St. are right and are successful sometimes, Illinois is not. Um, Illinois fans really don't have high expectations for the football program. We have sucked for 20 years now because of s***ty coaches. Ron Turner and Ron Zook were each allowed to coach the program for 7 years when both should have been fired earlier than that (Turner year 6, Zook year 5). Illinois fans are basically looking for the program to get to Iowa's level. That isn't unreasonable and a good coach is capable of doing that.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Oct 7, 2014 -> 01:51 PM) Illinois is not a dead end job, its just a potential career killer. Unlike a Memphis job, there is a legitimate expectation that if you are the HC of Illinois you should be able to make a dent in the Big10 if you are looking to move onto one of the upper echelon schools. Its exactly like what a guy like Saban did at MSU. I'd agree with this. But that is also true of pretty much every non-elite head coaching job.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 7, 2014 -> 11:38 AM) It's a job where he is pretty much set up for failure. That simply isn't true. Ron Turner and Ron Zook who are both awful football coaches made BCS games at Illinois. A good coach can and almost certainly will win at Illinois. The last 4 Illinois coaches have all just been dreadful football coaches. And I'm not sure if it is still true but not long ago Illinois had more active NFL players than every other school in the Big 10 except Ohio State. Illinois is never going to be Ohio State (well at least not for a really really long time and multiple great hires) but a good coach will win at Illinois.

Not surprising but Ray Allen signs with Cleveland.

QUOTE (Y2JImmy0 @ Oct 7, 2014 -> 10:42 AM) This isn't really true. He's paid the going rate. He's paid what he's worth. Go look around the league and check out other QB contracts for guys comparable to Jay. Yep. f*** the Ravens and Joe Flacco for setting the market at such a ridiculous rate.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 7, 2014 -> 09:17 AM) - Thibs did not send in the starters in the fourth. I think we can relax about his minutes this year. He definitely seems to get it. Hopefully true, but it is the preseason. This means nothing.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Oct 6, 2014 -> 11:06 AM) Rumors circling around Florida right now, not good. For some reason whenever Illinois appears to start a coaching search there are higher profile jobs that just open. If I was ILL I would pounce now before Michigan, Florida and some of the others have openings. Echoing what others have said, for the Illinois football job teams like Michigan and Florida having openings just isn't relevant since they will not be recruiting from the same types of candidates. We need to avoid openings from other similarly tiered programs or have a program that is a higher tier but not seen as an elite job (like Texas A&M) not open up.

QUOTE (Brian @ Oct 5, 2014 -> 04:35 PM) Lunt out with fracture in leg. 4-6 weeks If this somehow saves Beckman's job Thomas need to be fired. I'm fine with Thomas getting one more shot at hiring a football coach given that he made two really good hires at Cincy and pretty much every other coaching decision he has made at Cincy and Illinois at least looks decent but if he doesn't fire Beckman after this year he should be sent packing.

QUOTE (Boogua @ Oct 4, 2014 -> 05:31 PM) Melvin Gordon has 260 yards rushing. Wisconsin has 7 points. I don't think I've ever seen something like that before. Their QB play is as bad as Illinois' coaching.

Beckman, Banks and Mike Ward should all be let go the second this game is over. Let Cubit or Golesh be the head coach the rest of the year and hire some high school coaches to coach the defense. They sadly would probably do a lot better.

Tim Beckman and Tim Banks are lol bad. Worst coached defense in America.

QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Oct 2, 2014 -> 08:45 PM) So these TNF have been real close the last 3 weeks... It isn't like the first two were good games either. Closest Thursday night game this year was decided by 20 points.

QUOTE (VAfan @ Sep 29, 2014 -> 11:01 AM) Why don't we get the 7th pick? I count only 6 teams worse than us: Boston, Minnesota, Houston, Texas, Colorado and Arizona. We're tied with Philly and the Cubs, but our record was worse than both last season, so we should win the tiebreaker. Isn't that right? Houston also has a compensation pick that will be before us based on not signing Aiken this year.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Sep 28, 2014 -> 08:47 PM) Cancelled his in-home visits as well. He knows where he is going, but man that doesn't bode well for Illinois imo. It seems like Ok St. has the momentum on this one but Groce had an in-home with Evans just last week and the Illinois staff has known he was going to be announcing this week for quite some time so I wouldn't read to much into the decision date.

QUOTE (Boogua @ Sep 25, 2014 -> 02:46 PM) There's some legit buzz that Thomas might commit tomorrow. Let's hope it happens. And Doral Moore is no longer visiting this weekend.

QUOTE (pettie4sox @ Sep 25, 2014 -> 11:12 AM) Tough predicament. I want the Royals to win the division but that means sweeping the Sox. How do others feel about it? I would be completely fine with the White Sox losing out. I want to make sure we stay in front of Philly and Cincy in the draft and we could easily catch the Cubs if we lose out.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Sep 23, 2014 -> 01:21 PM) What do I need to know about him? Lights out 3 pt shooter and very good ballhandler for a 2 from what I can tell.

Freaking awesome. So very close to pulling off a monster class now.

QUOTE (chw42 @ Sep 23, 2014 -> 11:55 AM) It still bugs me that we lost that first game. We could be sitting pretty at 3-0 right now playing with house money this week. Instead, we're likely looking at 2-2. The Bears could pretty easily by 0-3 as well so I'll take 2-1 at this point in the season.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Sep 22, 2014 -> 10:41 PM) Probably should have been a flag, didn't play the ball Definitely should have been. Refs played a huge role in the Bears winning that game but I'll take it.

So refs have been worth about 14 points to Bears tonight between the laughable PI call against the Jets and blowing that play dead.

Refs have f***ed Jets over bad tonight.

Great start. Jets and refs giving the game to the Bears so far.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Sep 22, 2014 -> 01:16 PM) On top of taking over a program that was terrible the 4 years prior, winning 1 big ten conference game the 2 years prior to his first year. So he basically resurrected the program, made 3 bowl games in 5 years and won two of them, and that, for an awful football program, is not good enough. Again, totally reasonable to let him go, and they should have earlier than they did, but people need some perspective on how good/bad he really was. Zook was the best of our last 4 coaches which speaks more to how bad the other 3 are then how good Zook is. It is telling that none of these guys have had any success anywhere else.