Illinois Football: Illini building impressive quarterback room under Bret Bielema

Illinois football is coming off the best season the program has had since the Rose Bowl run in 2007.

The Illini finally got back on a winning track with eight victories in 2022. I didn’t think I would see that many wins this quickly in the Bret Bielema era.

Football has so many different moving parts. You have 22 starters on the field with each player needing to do his duties or everything could fall apart in one single play.

While the game of football has all of these moving parts, there is one thing that makes it all run. This one thing is like oil in a car, it is the chef in a kitchen, it is the remote to a television. What is that one thing, you ask?

A quarterback.

Bret Bielema and the Illinois football coaching staff understand that the program needs a good quarterback to see success

Finding a good quarterback has been a struggle for the Illini over the past 10 years. I would say Nathan Scheelhaase in 2013 was the last quarterback who was solid, and even he had some bad seasons. Quarterback has just not been a strong position for the program.

And then you get to the previous coaching regime. Much like his time with the Chicago Bears, Lovie Smith just couldn’t evaluate quarterback talent. In the six seasons he coached Illinois, his quarterback room completed 51.5% of their passes for a season average of 1,962 yards, 10 touchdowns, and 9.2 interceptions. Those are insanely bad numbers.

Bielema and his coaching staff understand that the quarterback position makes everything else run more smoothly. His ability to bring in quarterback talent has been impressive thus far.

In 2021, Bielema was stuck with the hand he was dealt, as he joined the program in December 2020. So, Illinois still struggled at quarterback, throwing for 1,874 yards, 13 touchdowns, and six interceptions while having a 51.2% completion rate.

After that first year is when things started to change. Bielema was able to land a solid quarterback in Donovan Leary, who ranked No. 1232 in the class of 2022. He wasn’t going to play right away, so we were able to bring in transfer, Tommy DeVito.

In his lone season, DeVito set the Illinois school record for completion percentage by completing 69.6% of his passes in 2022. He also threw for 2,650 yards, 15 touchdowns, and four interceptions. Illinois finally had good quarterback play.

DeVito could only play one season at Illinois, though. Now that he has departed, Bielema needed to revamp the quarterback position. For the class of 2023, he was able to snag Cal Swanson. He is ranked as the No. 852 player in his class. But Swanson isn’t going to play right away. Illinois needed more immediate quarterback talent.

Bielema was able to bring in not one but two transfer quarterbacks. We landed John Paddock from Ball State and Luke Altmyer from Ole Miss. Altmyer is a former four-star recruit and was a four-star transfer who has a near lock on the starting job this fall.

The quarterback room got even bigger this past Thursday as well. The top quarterback in the state of Mississippi, Trey Petty, decided to commit to Illinois. He is the No. 909 player in the class of 2024. Petty picked Illinois over teams like Mississippi State, Indiana, and West Virginia.

I think the old saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Bielema knows what Illinois was going through when he entered the program. He knew how bad the quarterback situation was with this program. He is making it clear, not with his words but with his actions, that Illinois football will have a solid quarterback behind center as long as he is in Champaign.