Illinois going nowhere fast.

Posted on: May 25, 2018 at 15:07:44 CT

They have lost Gabe Megginson, Tre Watson and Patrick Nelson. I think they lost a QB too, one also transferred in.

Megginson, who was the biggest recruit out of the three, has probably the least impact, since a bunch of true freshman passed him up the past year.

But Tre Watson, a LB, and Patrick Nelson, a safety, both had 65 tackles last year, tied for 3rd on the team. Nelson is from Chicago.

They all have more than 2 years remaining. Megginson is an obvious transfer candidate but the other 2 are going to hurt as Illinois tries to actually win a game in the Big 10 next year. The only team they even put up a fight against was 5-7 Minnesota.(24-17)

Lovie Smith has never been more than a position coach in College FB. He seems to be doing and saying the right things on the surface, but he's getting no results. Now in his 3rd year he's trying what a lot of SEC teams do and hiring a HS coach to get the HS kids.

(And actually a lot of these STL kids have all been coached by Cory Patterson and the other new prominent coaches in the area since they were very young. He/They brought them up as a youth team(s), thats how he got the job at Trinity.)

We'll see if Lovie Smith can juggle this situation and keep everyone happy. When you're hiring a coach to recruit his kids agendas can diverge really quickly.

I'm really interested to see how it plays out with Isaiah Williams. Something no one seems to mention is that while Isaiah is a 5* athlete, no other college program recruited him mainly at QB. He's not a 5* QB. He's probably a dual threat 3* QB and he's 5'10 160. It's tough at that size to get a shot at QB in the Power 5, so Illinois definitely has a big advantage taking him at QB.

But you know, unless Illinois finds a decent quarterback this year and wins some games, Williams won't end up there anyway. If Illinois does win some games then they probably found a decent QB and Williams at 5'10 160 is stuck behind someone with probably 3 more years to play(Illinois added a grad transfer QB as well, but he's got 11 career snaps). So he's committed to Illinois at the moment but as everything plays out we'll see what happens. If Illnois loses to Rutgers in October that will be very very very bad for them.

Bryce Childress their other Trinity commit is very small as well(very good though). Don't think MU is really recruiting slot recievers this year, we have a few, just added Gicinto, so the only 2 guys that committed to Illinois probably didn't have offers from Missouri at their preferred positions. (Although I'm sure Missouri offered Williams as an athlete, Bryce Childress I'm not sure we offered but is sure good enough if we weren't full at slot wr). Also won't end up at Illinois if they have a bad season.

Illinois on offense AND defense, with no real impact guys coming in, is going to be entirely dependent on developing guys from John Groce's last year and Lovie Smith's first two years. They got a lot of guys experience on offense last year, but there's nothing but hope to say they'll play any better in 2018. Defense is the same way but they lost 2 actually decent upperclassmen. Its tough to find more than 3-4 wins for them.

Comparing them to Mizzou, in the worst case scenario for us, both teams end up with a 5-7 record(Personally I think 7-8 wins for us should be expected, low key expecting even more) and Illinois gets a few of the local kids with that record and Missouri gets 1 or none. EVEN if this worst case happens it won't be that bad. The alumni will open the faucet for a big time coach that can turn things quickly. EVEN in this worst case scenario we won't have 3 win and 2 win seasons like Illinois did. We won't be as bad as the Illini.