Dialing back some expectations for the Illinois football team is probably a good thing right now.
This team isn’t going to win a national title tomorrow but, with every recruiting class, I want to see the team improve in quality. Getting the best recruits in the nation is a great thing. I love to see top 300 players commit to the program because they are the best of the best. But, what I really look at is how many top 1000 players Illinois can pull in.
One of the biggest issues with a team like Illinois is the depth concerns. There isn’t enough competition on the team, or when a player goes down with an injury the team takes a hit because the backup player isn’t near the level of the starter. That is why I focus on the top 1000 players. The more of these type of players the better for the program. These are the players that create quality depth.
Don’t get me wrong, there are recruits out there outside of the top 1000 that perform well and become all-conference caliber. Illinois has some on the team right now. But, if we are banking on all of the players outside the top 1000 in a recruiting class to be special, then we aren’t going to make bowl games on a yearly basis.
Illinois had some successful seasons under Ron Zook. Even if you didn’t like him as a coach – I thought he was a terrible coach but great recruiter – you still have to give the man some credit for getting talented players into Champaign. In fact, he consistently got top 1000 players to commit to his first four recruiting classes.
Zook managed to pull in 10 top 1000 recruits for the class of 2006, 14 in 2007, 17 in 2008 and 14 in 2009. That is why there was some success with the program during his time in Champaign. He made three bowl games which included the Rose Bowl.
Toward the end of Zook’s tenure with the Illini, his recruiting started to slip. He finished with 7 top 1000 recruits in the class of 2010, 11 in 2011 and 8 in 2012. This should have been enough talent to get the next head coach – Tim Beckman – to bowl games immediately.
But, Beckman’s coaching was just as bad as Zook’s and he wasn’t the recruiter. Beckman started his career with 5 top 1000 recruits in the class of 2013, 3 in 2014 and 8 in 2015. The level of recruiting just wasn’t there for Beckman and the only reason he made a bowl game his final year as the head coach was because of Zook’s recruits.
This bad recruiting by Beckman left the Illini with little in the way of depth. In addition to him leaving the Illini with a bad recruiting situation, the class of 2016 had a head coach named Bill Cubit managing it. Illinois only snagged 3 top 1000 recruits for that class and this continued to put the Illini in a deep hole.
I see a lot of people jumping off the Lovie bandwagon already – some didn’t even get on – but I am not sure why. This program struggled with recruiting the four classes prior to Lovie’s first in 2017. During the Beckman and Cubit era, Illinois only secured a total of 19 top 1000 recruits in the four recruiting classes, which comes out to 4.75 top 1000 players per class. That is unacceptable and now Lovie is trying to fix this mess.
So far, through one full recruiting class and the class of 2018 that isn’t complete yet, Lovie has secured a total of 14 top 1000 recruits. He had eight in his first class last year and in the class of 2018, he has six players in the top 1000 committed so far. My goal for the team right now is to hit the 10 top 1000 commits mark.
There is a possibility to have this happen as well. Merlin Robertson is No. 164 in the nation, Verdis Brown is No. 324, Dayven Coleman is No. 747 and Cadarius Gaskin is No. 783. If Illinois can land all four of these recruits it would give them 10 top 1000 commits for 2018. If they don’t land them all will that mean this class is a failure? Of course not, but I would like to see Lovie close a majority.
Next: Top 5 recruiting targets for the Illini
For those of you who are doubting Lovie, the talent level is rising whether you like it or not. We aren’t to the level of an Ohio State or even Nebraska yet, but you have to crawl before you walk. Times are changing in Champaign. We Will Win.