• Reporter 12
• 28 Aug, 2024

Tough. Smart. Dependable.

It might not be quite as evocative as Bears coach Matt Eberflus’ “H.I.T.S.” routine, but “T.S.D.” 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, 890-AM), 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 “T.S.D.” 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.”