The Illini are dead, long live the Illini!
October 11, 2007
For years basketball has dominated collegiate sports in Champaign, Illinois. Not hard to imagine in a year when our basketball team ties the record for most wins in a season and reaches the championship game during march madness in 2005. Our football team on the other hand was a combined 4-19 during the last two seasons.
Of course, anyone even remotely following college sports this year will have heard about the resurgent illini. Last Saturday we defeated Nr.5 Wisconsin and became the 18th team in the nation (we hadn’t been ranked sine 2001) and people around here are starting to get used to the fact the we now go to a bonafide football school. Its become impossible, for instance, to get tickets for home games, when before you could get them for free, if you knew the right guy, and even homecoming games would play with over 10,000 empty seats. Now $10 student tickets go for over $50 on facebook marketplace, a popular venue for scalpers.
The bar scene doesn’t seemed to have changed much yet. People would always watch some of the games at the bars, even when we were losing, and the streets don’t seem that much more congested with cars or rabid fans. But if we make it to one of the more prestigious bowl games, we may have a celebration on our hands comparable to those of 2005, which culminated with an emphatic “F**k Sean May” chant on the quad. We can only hope.
