Ron Zook and Martez Wilson locked eyes for a moment after Saturday’s game, enough time for the linebacking prodigy to tell his coach, “I know.”
What did Wilson know?
Zook: “He knows he didn’t play the way I want him to play.”
Wilson: “I knew he would say: ‘Play faster. Play more aggressive. Be physical.’ I already know what he’s going to say because he tells me that every day.”
Everyone marvels at Wilson’s gifts. He’s 6 feet 4 inches and 246 pounds, with the power to slam Eastern Illinois punt returner Adam Kesler on the game’s final play and the speed to make up two strides on 181-pound Panthers tailback Travorus Bess on a 47-yard run.
“He’s one of the purest athletes you’ve ever seen,” fellow Illini linebacker Brit Miller said.
His potential is so sick, the junior made the Butkus Award watch list before starting his first collegiate game one week ago.
The USA Today All-American from Simeon High School also was named preseason first-team all-Big Ten.
When he shows blitz, opposing quarterbacks hyperventilate. Or at least consider calling a timeout.
“Anytime he was on the line of scrimmage,” Miller said, “they were staring at him — quarterback, linemen, anybody around him.”
And yet not everyone is impressed — because his potential has yet to meet the performance.
“He has a ways to go,” former Illini great Dana Howard said at halftime Saturday in the back of the press box. “He just needs to concentrate, [study] the playbook a little more, watch a little more film.
“In the Missouri game I saw some lackadaisical things where it was almost as if he was lost. I’m not trying to dog him. He’s a great talent. But I don’t think he realizes what he really has.”
Howard squeezed every drop of ability from his 6-foot frame. Though he played just briefly in the NFL, he managed to win the Butkus Award in 1994 and remains Illinois’ all-time leading tackler — by 94 hits.
“I’m being critical on him because I look at him like a little brother,” said Howard, one of a half-dozen linebacking greats who returned to campus Saturday. “If I don’t do it, who will?”
Zook will, for certain. But it will only help Wilson to hear another voice remind him that he can be a top-20 pick in the NFL draft.
“Coming from someone with high prestige, I feel like that’s an honor,” Wilson said when told of Howard’s comments. “When guys like that come to coach us and tell us what we need to do, that makes you want to work even harder.”
The two never have met. But they should.
Howard can be to Wilson what Darrick Brownlow, the school’s No. 3 all-time tackler, was to him.
“For me there’s no reason to beat around the bush with him,” Howard said. “I can tell him straight up what’s going on: ‘This is what you need to do. This is what you’re not doing. To get to the next level, you need to step it up a notch and stop running around as if you’re a chicken with its head cut off.'”
Wilson graded himself a C/C- in his first start, against Missouri.
His goal is eight tackles per game, and he finished Saturday with nine, including one for a loss (second only to Miller’s 11 and 21/2).
“Today I’d say B or B+,” Wilson said after the Illini’s 47-21 victory. “I didn’t miss too many tackles. I was playing faster.”
Zook agreed that Wilson performed better Saturday, although it came against a non-Division I opponent.
“‘Tez is one of those guys who when everything’s on, he has a motor and can play. But when you’re thinking, it slows you down,” he said. “We coach perfection, and if we don’t get perfection, we want a level that we’re all happy with.”
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tgreenstein@tribune.com
