A College Football Post!

If anyone is reading this blog, they'll notice that I haven't said much about college football yet. It's hard to believe there's not much buzz around the Illini football program and the soon-to-be unemployed Ron Zook with only a month to go before the season kicks off, but that's what happens when a team has only two winning seasons in a decade (and three in the last 15 years), I guess.

Well, college football fans, today's your lucky day, because I came across this article, entitled "Ron Zook Looks to Stimulate Fan Support." Talk about a misleading headline - there was nothing in the article saying that Zook was about to resign! But after all the blather about staying positive and working harder came this quote, from the author:

All teams need fan support to play their best. If Illini fans want their team to be successful, they will forget last year and focus on helping the team win this year.

Even if they think a change in the head coach is the only solution, they cannot rule out their own contribution to failure if they refuse to support the team. Illini players and coaches will give everything they have to the effort, so the fans need to do likewise to know without doubt they aren't part of the problem.

Yes, because that's the biggest problem with this team. It's not the players, or the coaches who recruited them, or the Athletic Director who hired the coaches who recruited the players. It's the fans who have endured the second-worst Big Ten football program of the last 15 years (only Indiana is worse, and I'm not even sure they have a football team) - yes, it's our fault that the team stinks (hmm, I think I may have heard that before).

Look, guys, I'm more than happy to forget last year (and most of the last decade, frankly) and give "everything I have" to help the Illini win in whatever way that I can - you know, support the team. But if it's a Saturday afternoon in October and Illinois falls behind 28-3 in the second quarter, I'm probably going to be doing something else besides supporting the team. My leaves aren't going to rake themselves, you know.