Illinois, Bret Bielema must rediscover momentum or else they'll disappear in 18-team Big Ten

Tough. Smart. Dependable.

It might not be quite as evocative as Bears coach Matt Eberflus’ “HITS” routine, but “TSD” is Illinois coach Bret Bielema’s thing.

Look, it’s hardly all Bielema’s fault if those adjectives don’t sound much like Illini football through the years.

Are we really going to run through the sad, sorry history again? We are. We must. But only enough to set the premise.

Illinois still hasn’t had a coach with a winning record since John Mackovic, who bolted for Texas after the 1991 season. There has been one winning season in 12 years and only four of them in the last 23, as well as back-to-back bowl appearances only once post-Mackovic — in 2010 and 2011, the mediocre final two go-rounds for Ron Zook before he was fired.

Bielema, who is 18-19 at the school, is still trying to move the needle yet already has an outside chance to finish his fourth season in the top 10 on the list of Illini coaching wins; Lou Tepper is in 10th, three spots ahead of him, with 25. And if Bielema were to continue at a neither good nor awful rate of six wins per year through the end of his contract, in 2028? Almost unbelievably, he’d be all the way up in third place on the list, behind forever-ago coaches Bob Zuppke (131) and Ray Eliot (83).

It’s no wonder the Illini’s eight wins in 2022 were a 15-year high. As the Illini open their season Thursday against Eastern Illinois (8 p.m., BTN), there’s a sense surrounding them that they have to get back to that level — or, at minimum, improve on last year’s 5-7 — or else life in an 18-team Big Ten will become extremely unpleasant. Bielema is at risk of becoming indistinguishable from Ron Turner, Zook, Lovie Smith, et al., even if he’s stronger than any of them were in certain areas. And Illini football is at risk of receding even deeper into the shadows.

If “TSD” is the answer, then — for crying out loud — let’s see it.

“The bottom line is it’s about wins,” Bielema said.

It’s about winning the close games, too, of which Illinois has played a ton — with poor results — since starting a surprising 7-1 in 2022. Last season ended with six straight games decided by four or fewer points and included a pair of galling defeats, the first of which came at home against Wisconsin, which rode an 18-0 fourth quarter to a 25-21 win that was a rib-cracking body shot to ex-Badgers coach Bielema and his team. The other came at home against Northwestern in the finale, when the Illini needed to win to reach a bowl game but instead wilted against the Wildcats’ run-of-the-mill offense and lost 45-43.

“To lose the Northwestern game the way that we did I think really put a feeling in our guys about how close they were and what they could have done,” Bielema said. “As you progress as a program, you should play your best football at the end of the year. But we fell short at the toughest time.”

It wasn’t only in close games when the Illini revealed a soft underbelly. A total defensive no-show in a 44-19 loss at Purdue was embarrassing. A total offensive no-show in a 20-7 home loss to Nebraska was demoralizing.

It was a team Bielema honestly felt going in could win the Big Ten West in the final season of divisional play in the conference. Either he miscalculated, or he and his staff blew it. Or both.

“I don’t know, [with the] players or coaches, if I put the fundamentals of what we really are in them hard enough,” he said. “I just thought it was going to happen.”

But tough didn’t happen. Smart didn’t. Dependable didn’t. It has to be better, and now.

“I think this team has an edge to them that I like,” he said.

The 2022 team was powered by a core of NFL-bound defensive standouts and ended up allowing a scant 12.8 points per game, a number Georgia, Michigan, Alabama or Ohio State would eagerly sign up for any year. But last year, under first-year coordinator Aaron Henry, opponents’ average scores ballooned to 29.4. Such a gaping variation from one year to the next would be unthinkable in the program Bielema is trying to build.

The Illini do have a returning quarterback in Luke Altmyer, a good group of running backs, an offensive line that should be better than most and a defense that ought to at least inch back in the right direction. It can be a pretty good few months. Again, it has to be.

“You learn more from moments of adversity than you do from moments of success,” Bielema said.

All Illinois football has had is fleeting moments. Will it ever change?