The 90 Illini #18: Isaiah Adams

The top eighteen players on The 90 Illini this year: 17% Canadian. Chase & Sydney Brown are from London, Ontario and Isaiah Adams is from Ajax (a suburb of Toronto). There's also a punter from Australia and an offensive lineman from Denmark, so

The 90 Illini #19: Taz Nicholson

It's 2022 and the 2020 Illini recruiting class barely exists. It was always going to be a small class, given that there were only 11 seniors on the team in 2019. That Senior Day took about 12 minutes. So it wasn't really unexpected that the 2020 signing

The 90 Illini #20: Luke Ford

I've done the "Covid year" math on dozens and dozens of players at this point. And I still get tripped up. It's so difficult to get the math correct. Mostly because of the "years in which to play four seasons" thing. I just covered Calvin Avery last

The 90 Illini #21: Ezekiel Holmes

Ezekiel Holmes was the last player added to the 2018 class. It all happened within the month of February. He visited the weekend of February 2nd & 3rd, verballed on the 4th, and signed on the 7th. One spot left in that class and the staff added a

The 90 Illini #22: Josh McCray

"There's no way he's a running back", I said. "He'll be an outside linebacker. Two Cruises." I've referenced that so many times over the last year because it's very important to acknowledge WHY I was wrong. McCray was the first Bielema recruit, and

The 90 Illini #23: Jordyn Slaughter

Would you believe I'm caught up? There are 23 days until the season and Jordyn Slaughter is number 23 on this list. Looking at the dates for the articles I've published, the first one I wrote last Thursday morning was Kionte Curry, and he was #40, so

Pick My Post: Tailgating

Continuing through some PMP suggestions and this one should be pretty easy. The one thing that moving to Champaign has changed the most about game day for me: the 5.5 hours previously reserved for driving before and after the game are now spent tailgating

The 90 Illini #24: TeRah Edwards

TeRah Edwards is a redshirt freshman, but he's a junior. So on one hand, when I fill out the information below, I think "why would I have a redshirt freshman who transferred in during the offseason and didn't have the luxury of learning the defense

Pick My Post - 4-0 Start

I have something going on in about 45 minutes so this one will follow the old Pick My Post rules. I have 45 minutes (in this case, 41) to research and write an entire post. It started as a way to show off my writing chops -- you could see the timestamp

The 90 Illini #25: Kendall Smith

Kendall Smith was the second player to commit to Lovie Smith. And it was only maybe an hour after the first. In April of 2016 (about six weeks after Lovie got the job), Ricky Smalling committed. And then immediately after that, Kendall Smith committed