For years, people always have talked about Illinois as the sleeping giant of Big Ten football.
Comatose dwarf would be more like it.
Ron Zook may learn the Illini job isn’t what it is cracked up to be.
You would, in fact, have to be a little cracked to think otherwise.
This is a football program that has had just 19 winning seasons in the past 50 years, with only three since 1992. The record over those 50 years is 231-292-15.
That is half a century of persistent mediocrity, broken only by a few seasons during Mike White’s coaching tenure in the 1980s and the middle two years of John Mackovic’s tenure in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Mackovic, who was 30-16-1, thought Illinois was such a good job he left at the first good opportunity, going to Texas.
Even during the lengthy period when the Big Ten was called the Big Two (Michigan, Ohio State) and the Little Eight, Illinois was far from the best of the rest.
Illinois athletic director Ron Guenther said he would go “all the way to Mars” for a new coach. Big deal. Champaign is a suburb of Mars, with the same isolated and lifeless ambiance. It may not be the end of the world, but you can see it from Champaign with the naked eye.
Illinois is a fine university with a great faculty in a lousy place to be a football coach. That has been the naked truth for decades.
How have the Illini done it in basketball? Takes about one-sixth as many good players and one-tenth as many great ones.
