Perhaps the fate of University of Illinois football coach Ron Zook DOES lie in this year’s performance. He’s not feeling the pressure to win now, however, either way.
“No, I don’t, to be honest with you,” Zook said at Monday’s media day press conferences. “I think everyone that stands up here today has got pressure. Obviously some of us have more than others. I think the thing that you try to do is you do the best you can do.”
The problem with that statement is that over the last couple of seasons, Zook’s best hasn’t nearly been good enough.
By Paul Schmidt
Two seasons after the Rose Bowl successes of the 2007-2008 campaign, denizens of Champaign-Urbana are left with basically nothing to look forward to. The roster is young. The roster is unproven. Where there are veterans, questions abound.
And this is the roster that Zook needs to make a bowl with this season.
All along, Ron Zook was viewed as a master recruiter, a guy who might not exactly be a tactician on the football field, but that would certainly bring in top talent to Central Illinois.
He put up 8-5 records at Florida — That’s something that you can’t do in Gainesville, but if you do it in Champaign, they erect statues for you in front of Memorial Stadium.
However, the talent well has dried up, as Zook’s classes get worse and worse as we go into his tenure, including this past season where he rated as one of the bottom two or three (depending what scouting mags you read) classes in the Big Ten.
So it’s even more mystifying that he would drop this gem at the beginning of his presser:
“And the way the players, the way they responded, I think it’s a tribute to both the coaches and players, the type of young men we have,” Zook said. “And our guys, they feel like they have something to prove, which I think is exciting to be around that kind of attitude. It’s kind of like the attitude we had a couple of years when we were fortunate enough to go to the Rose Bowl. I think on paper we’re probably every bit if not better a football team than we were that year. But still there’s so many things that enter into it.”
You read that correctly — Ron Zook believes that this football team is every bit as good as the 2008 Rose Bowl team, a team that featured 10 players on offense and defense that have been or are still in the NFL. It makes it difficult to take anything that Zook says seriously after a statement like that.
The larger problem is that Zook actually believes he can win. Actually, it’s ok that the head coach of a major college football team thinks his team can win — what the actual problem is is that he believes the methods he has employed so far have actually worked.
The one good thing this season is the new coordinators actually appear capable of doing their jobs. Vic Koenning on defense and Paul Petrino on offense both signed multi-year contracts and appear set to totally revamp the game-plans on both sides of the ball (more on that tomorrow). These won’t be your Daddy’s Illini, that’s for sure. Hell, this won’t be last year’s Illini, for that matter.
The question remains though, do either of the coordinators have the personnel to do what they want and need to be successful?
One good piece of news coming from the Zook press conference, and something that wasn’t just owed to the delusions or hubris of the head coach, was on the health of middle linebacker Martez Wilson.
“He had a great, great spring. He had a great camp. He was playing as well as any Mike linebacker I’ve been around probably anywhere,” Zook said. “In fact, actually he went through spring, he didn’t go through the contact. It was hard to keep him out of it because he was always trying to stick his face where he shouldn’t stick it. Just got his final checkup last week, and got 100 percent clean bill of health and ready to go.”
Wilson’s health means that the defense will automatically be more athletic and dangerous than they were last season. Will it actually matter, though?
In Ron Zook’s world, it might just make them National Championship contenders.