FanHouse Illinois

We've talked at length about the rampant gambling that goes on among NBA players -- it's gotten so bad that some players are apparently leading fans sitting courtside astray -- but David Stern should be happy to know that not every player in his league is traveling down that sinful path.

Jazz guard Dee Brown made a friendly wager with Salt Lake Tribune writer Steve Luhm, though he refused to make it interesting with any money. From Luhm's blog Jazz Notes in the Salt Lake Tribune:

Two weeks ago after a game, I was talking to Brown. The brief discussion turned to Illinois and the upcoming NCAA Tournament. When I suggested the Illini would be lucky to be a No. 10 seed, he was horrified.

Seeing a chance to fleece a gullible young man who was blinded by loyalty to his alma mater, I suggested a friendly wager.

I suggested betting one dollar that Illinois would be seeded higher than No. 10, if it even got an at-large bid to the 65-team tournament. Perhaps because he doesn't make superstar money, Brown wanted to bet something other than one George Washington.

His idea: If Illinois made the tournament as something better than a 10-seed, I would have to bow down to him and his wisdom. On the other hand, if Illinois made the tournament as a 10-seed or higher, he would have to bow down to me.

Because the Jazz immediately embarked on a four-game road trip, I didn't see Brown until this week. Yes, he paid up. He walked out of the locker room prior to Monday's practice, bowed down, shook my hand and laughed. Typical Brown, although I would have preferred the $1.

Considering the league's crackdown on Gilbert Arenas over a ten-spot, it was probably a good idea for Brown to avoiding putting even a single buck on the line. And, on a side note, here's to hoping he put that dollar saved into a jar so he can save up for another totally awesome sport coat like the one pictured above.

It didn't take long for Ron Zook to dismiss two players accused of serious crimes:

Illinois football players Jody Ellis and Derrick McPhearson -- accused of stealing wallets, cell phones and laptop computers -- were kicked off the team Monday just hours after pleading not guilty to felony burglary and theft charges.

Readers are invited to to discuss amongst themselves who, exactly, is stupider here: the alleged criminals, who left a woman's wallet on the front seat for police to discover...

Bridges saw a female wallet in plain view along with other property that led her to believe there was something more going on, Gallo said. "She was alert and caught on to that something more."

...or the victims, who were all out getting hammered at "Unofficial St. Patrick's Day," an impromptu U of I holiday held whenever students are going to be on spring break during Actual St. Patrick's day and left their doors unlocked(!!!)...

State's Attorney Julia Rietz said the items were taken from four Champaign residences in and around campus on Friday, during what's called unofficial St. Patrick's Day. The event is a promotion begun by local bars to make up for revenue they lose when St. Patrick's Day falls during the university's spring break. Rietz said it appeared that most victims had left their doors unlocked.

...yeah. If you consistently leave your doors unlocked on any college campus in the country, the end result is all your stuff gets stolen and several hippies move in an form a drum circle under your loft, even if a bacchanalian drinking orgy is not underway.

Though the dismissed duo didn't combine for a ton of catches -- only 19 between them -- McPhearson saw his share of rushes and returned nine kickoffs as a sophomore. With freshman Juice Williams flailing his way to the worst year a Big Ten quarterback has had in recent memory, there weren't many catchable balls to go around. (One-hopped or comically errant passes destined for Tacopants were availabe in abundance, but don't count towards receiving stats.) Illinois could have used both as they try to claw their way towards respectability in 2007, though incoming uber-recruit Arrelious Benn will lessen the sting of the dismissals.

Ron Zook is a machine. Literally. Gene Wojciechowski's latest column references a Feb. 5 Mark Schablach column on Zook and his magic fingers. Relevant passage from the Schablach column:

Zook also sends text messages to recruits incessantly. He has sent more than 95 million kilobytes of text messages from his BlackBerry since the contact period began Nov. 26. Zook isn't sure exactly how many text messages have been sent, but he knows the handheld device rarely leaves his fingers. (The NCAA currently has no rules in place regulating coaches' text messaging; an NCAA committee is considering whether to ban text messaging to recruits altogether or restrict when messages can be sent.)

This, how you say, is completely impossible. Text messages are tiny things. According to this How Stuff Works article they have 27 bytes of overhead and then one byte per character with a maximum of 160 (it's actually less than this because of special encoding, but it's simpler to ignore that; the bias in the results will be slightly towards plausibility). A text message is at most 187 bytes. If Ron Zook maxed out every message he sent to Benn or Wilson or whoever, his 95 trillion bytes become 508 million text messages. In 72 days. That's seven million per day, or 300,000 per hour or 5000 per minute or 81 every single second from November 26th to Feburary 5th. If you were an Illinois recruit -- assuming reasonably that by November 26th they were down to, say, 81 targets -- you got a 160-character text message every single second from November 26th to February 5th, over six million in total.

Or maybe this is just another Alex Boone, -450 pounds situation.

Someone alert Les Miles so he can drop an f-bomb: LSU recruit Terrance Toliver, a Texan who is one of the top wide receivers in the country, was apparently the subject of frequent negative recruiting from the Florida Gators:

"Every time (Florida recruiters) came, they just said LSU doesn't qualify their players," Toliver told FOX 26's Mark Berman Wednesday. "About (how) their academics are not all that. It kind of had me confused."

Eventually a bewildered Toliver asked his football coach Rick Sargent and Hempstead instructional coordinator Tina Johnson to go to Baton Rouge to find out the truth about LSU. The two went last weekend. "They went and checked (LSU'S) academics out and their facilities," Toliver said. "They just came back and told me whatever Florida was saying about the academics wasn't true."

I'm shocked, shocked that there's negative recruiting going on in the SEC, but what is interesting is that recruits are becoming more open about it. The Toliver accusations were preceded by a Washington Post article on Illinois recruit Arrelious Benn, who received a series of insulting text messages from then Notre Dame QB coach Peter Vaas:

"FYI, ILL is telling Robert Hughes that they will build their offense around him? Didn't they tell you that? Coach Vaas," Vaas wrote Benn on Dec. 17.

Earlier that month, Vaas left this voice message on Benn's phone: "You don't want to do anything except bury your head in the sand. . . . I guess you're not tough enough to compete at the big level."

...against all the service academies instead of, you know, Michigan and Ohio State.

Moral of the story: be prepared to have kids rat you out if you're a poopyhead.

Mike Gottfried on the ESPN U signing day special, just lost it around the 3:30 mark regarding the New York Times article on Illinois and Ron Zook today. He complained about how it was a hit piece on Illinois and [Name redacted] Ron Zook. He starts with repeating his standard preamble praise of every coach, "[fill-in name of coach] is an honest guy..." He used it to describe just about every coach so far they talked about in recruiting.

"Now there was a cheap shot today taken by the New York Times [holds up the computer print-out of the article then smacks and shakes it as he goes on] against the Illinois program. Now this is not true. Ah, Bill O'Reilly on Factor, uh, on Fox Network [looks around at the other people of the table for help, they all have a bemused look on their faces] he has been after the New York Times all year about Iraq and getting on President Bush and the inaccurate facts and all that. This is inaccurate also [tossing the article on the table]. When you look at the timing of this, this was meant to hurt Illinois in recruiting -- today. When they signed the players, and what has happened is, there's a mid-west university that's out there that has lost some players to Illinois. They're out there crying there must be cheating going on, because why wouldn't the players come here to our school, and why are they going to Illinois. I'll tell you, they picked on the wrong guys..."

Now, that's the way to go after the truthiness of the story. Rely on Bill O'Reilly and how the Bush Administration has handled the Iraq War as a way to refute it.

That follows with the other recruiting people around the table defend Zook. Gottfried ends the segment and going to commercial by picking up the article and tossing back on the table once again saying, "I wouldn't wrap dead fish in this paper -- the New York Times. Don't care about it, and, uh, it's wrong."

Ron Zook comes in for the interview around 3:50. They finally got to the NY Times article. "Well, you know... This is our players' day. I don't even really want to respond to that kind of stuff. There's gonna' come a time when I'm gonna' respond, and I am, but I think that today is the day for our players. Uh, as I said that happens, Um, uh, I know this, if that's all they can find after all the time that they spent, it makes you feel all that much better about the program and where you are at."

Which could be taken to mean, hey this just shows we are clean; or even after all that digging they couldn't find the money trail. Whooppee!

In 1982, the University of Illinois purchased a costume for their mascot, Chief Illiniwek, from the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It came complete with a headdress made of eagle feathers, and they paid $3500 for it. Now, the Oglala Sioux Tribe wants it back.

They aren't happy with how the costume is being used, and they've called Chief Illiniwek "a degrading racial stereotype." Illinois has yet to decide anything on the matter, and even if they did decide to give the costume back, they might not be able to deliver the entire thing, as they replaced the eagle feathers with turkey feathers (I suppose it's more important to be respectful of eagles than of Native Americans). They don't even know if they still have the eagle feathers.

Illinois can make no decision other than to give the costume back immediately. I don't care if the original intention was to "honor" someone, the reality is that they have a man telling them that he, his family, and his tribe feel degraded by the use of the costume. That far outweighs anyone's whimsical desire to see a man dressed up as a Native American on game days. If that's what appeals to fans, they can stay home and watch an old Cowboys and Indians movie.