Writing the Pine

The Writing Illini Blog is live! Special thanks to my good friend, Kyeon, for the awesome banner!

I’ve decided to start my own blog covering mostly Illinois football and basketball, with the occasional shout-outs to Illini graduates Steve Stricker and D.A. Points for their awesomeness in golf.

The focus of this blog will be to bring a fan’s view of the team, a perspective that hasn’t been polluted by the opinion of the national media, or – despite their great work – even the professional Illini beatwriters such as Tupper, Supinie and Asmussen.

If you are going out of your way to visit an Illini sports blog, chances are you at least know some of your stuff.  So I won’t bore you with trivial drivel such as “Did you know Juice Williams was nicknamed “Juice” by his grandmother cause he was a fat baby?” which you probably heard on the Big Ten Network and ESPN a few dozen times.  I also won’t do any news reporting or coverage whatsoever, because there are plenty of full-time professionals who do a much more effective job of that than I could ever do.

I don’t profreed my work, so please don’t cried and e-mailed me hatemail about my tenses changing mid-sentence, grammatical and spelling eras, and other such petty nonsense.  I also have attention deficit disorder so spare me your harsh words if I lose focus and go off in a tangent.

Since I’m such a great fan of Illinois, I know what a pain it is to excitedly visit your favorite Illini news site and blog, anticipating a new post, only to see another lame win/loss predictions article with arbitrary final score predictions.  So per tradition, here are my predictions:

Date      Opponent        Result
9/5       Mizzou              45-28 W
9/12     Illinois St.        55-10 W
9/26     @ Ohio St.       31-28 W
10/3     Penn St.            38-31 W
10/10  Mich. St.           45-21 W
10/17  @ Indiana        45-0 W
10/24  @ Purdue         35-3 W
10/31    Michigan         35-21 W
11/7     @ Minnesota   37-33 W
11/14   Northwestern 24-21 W
11/27  @ Cincinnati    27-17 W
12/5     Fresno St.         41-17 W

Just kidding.

Here are a few of my predictions for the season:

Juice Williams will win Big Ten Offensive POY and receive First Team All-Big Ten honors, and will be in the Heisman Race longer than anyone has predicted in the preseason.

The media members who voted tOSU’s Terrelle Pryor for Offensive POY will eat crow.  Juice will break at least four more records before graduating and will be remembered as the greatest offensive player in Illini history not named Red Grange.

Tavon Wilson will emerge as the best player in the secondary by the end of the season.

I think he is the hardest hitter on the team (including a healthy Donsay Hardeman).  Some of his hits last year were reminiscent of vintage 2007 Vontae Davis.  Nothing excited me more last season than hearing a thundering crunching sound as he smashed ball carriers to the ground, silencing the stunned crowd for a full two seconds before the stadium erupted.  His coverage can improve but this guy can flat out play.  He saw lots of snaps last season and has plenty of experience with the first unit.  Our secondary should be improved in depth with Miami Thomas returning, Garrett Edwards, Travon Bellamy and Supo Sanni all seeing game experience last season and Patrick Nixon-Youman finally joining the team.  Dere Hicks will carry the title of best defender in the secondary entering the season and may very well hold on to that title, but expect Tavon to earn the Big Ten Conference’s respect by the end of the season.

Jacob Charest will win the back-up QB spot by the end of the season and Eddie McGee will be a wide receiver for his final two years of college ball barring injuries to Juice and Charest.

This is not a slight to McGee’s quarterbacking abilities by any means.  He can’t take contact and dish out the hurt like Juice, but he’s more agile, a better vertical runner and has better acceleration (perfect for WR!).  He’s going to play this year no matter what – he won’t win the starting QB job over Juice, but the coaches want him on the field because he’s a playmaker and a great leader.  He proved last year that he could be a reliable target at wide receiver and was on the receiving end of several important catches on check-downs from Juice during late-game situations.  We have yet to see Charest in a real game, but from practices, scrimmages and scouting reports he seems to have better accuracy than Juice and McGee.  He also possesses deceptive speed and mobility in the pocket which are necessities in Ron Zook’s spread offense.

Michael Hoomanawanui will set career highs in receptions, receiving yardage and touchdowns. Here are four reasons why:

1) Defenses can’t focus on all our WRs and still keep tabs on a TD with great hands like Uh-Oh.
2) I have faith that new OC Mike Schultz will try to mix it up in the red zone this year and try to utilize other plays than the Mike Locksley signature “fake hand-off to Ford, Juice-keeper” that we called every time. FAIL.
3) Our coaches have a vested interest in increasing Uh-Oh and Hubie Graham’s touches because they want to show our 2010 blue-chip tight-end commit C.J. Fiedorowicz that tight ends play a vital role in our offense (not that it really matters, because C.J. seems enamored with our school and staff.  Besides, we’ll probably lose Arrelious Benn to the draft and Jeff Cumberland, Uh-Oh, and Chris Duvalt are graduating, leaving C.J. tons of touches).
4) It’s Uh-Oh’s senior year and it will be his last chance to boost his NFL draft stock.