Illinois just finished the B10 2-6 and will not make a bowl game. Iowa finished 2-6 in the B10 3 years ago and played against Colt McCoy and his Texas Longhorns in the Alamo Bowl. How is that possible, you ask. Well, Iowa played a D-IAA school, Syracuse, Iowa State and Northern Illinois out of conference. Add those 4 wins to the 2 wins in the B10 and Iowa had 6 wins, enough to be bowl eligible. It's a pretty simple formula, yet for some reason, it eludes the Football Guy.

You see, no matter how bad the coaching is or how injured you are or how big of a bust a recruiting class is, 2 wins is usually attainable in the B10, just pick up 4 other cheap wins and you are, in most years, going bowling.

Illinois would not win those four games. UNI and ISU would beat them.

Disagree with this - play them both at home and I believe the Illini win both. ISU sucks, they just play Iowa tough because of the in-state rivalry. Same could be said for UNI.

Well, South Dakota State had some dude say that SIU and UNI were both better than Minnesota after the Gophers just squeeked by them last week. That ain't good for B10 apologists like myself. However, I think Illinois would destroy UNI and ISU. You could replace them with even softer teams, maybe Louisiana Tech instead of ISU and keep I Screwed Up on your schedule instead of UNI. Guenther could easily find four cupcakes to destroy.

Yeah, they lost to Iowa by 32 points this year. They had the luckiest game ever to beat Nebraska. 8 turnovers.

Northern Illinois beat Purdue -- we didn't.

Well, I'm confused by the start of this thread. You're saying Iowa played two BCS conference teams non-conference and that's smart scheduling. I'll have you note until recently, Syracuse was a pretty good team and ISU beat a ranked Nebraska team this year. Add in a decent NIU team and I'd say that Iowa's non-conference schedule was tougher than ours (except for the idea of playing Missouri in St. Louis). I don't buy the schedule argument and never have unless we schedule Florida, USC and Texas, our schedule (other than having 7 home games) has not been the problem. Heck, even with the Ohio Bobcats at home, we couldn't win the game.

My best hope for Zook (and believe me he's the reason we're still selling out games) is that Schultz works out well next year (having gotten players and coach on the same page), we bring in a dynamite DC and Zook is chief recruiter and cheerleader. That scenario can work as Zook is a great recruiter, does help fill the stadium (ala Mike White) and is enthusiastic about Illinois and passionate about his work. I'll remind you all that despite Mackovic's 30-16 record we only sold out Memorial 2 or 3 times in his entire four years.

I don't usually call people out personally, but this is the stupidest post I've seen on this board in a long time. WTF does the fact that Syracuse used to be good have to do with how tough Iowa's schedule was in 2006? WTF does the fact that ISU beat Nebraska this year (BFD) have to do with how good ISU was in 2006? This is just stupid.

In the recent past Illlinois has lost to San Jose St, Western Michigan and some other mac team that escapes me, and barely beat a horrible La Tech team last year, so I'd say the odds are good that we'd blow at least one of these "gimmes"

Just remember that the Zooker is the Anti-Bear. He can take his'n and lose to your'n or take your'n and lose to his'n.

There is some truth to this statement. However, having 7 home games would go a long way toward achieving bowl eligibility. The AD could not have set up a worse schedule. Truly, 7 home games, two BCS teams, and two cupcakes would almost assure a bowl game year in and year out. Fine, schedule Cincy and MO, but have two cupcakes at home and make sure that either the MO or Cincy game is at home. It is amazing that the AD has not scheduled in favor of the FB team.

Guenther just doesn't understand how to build a football team. I think he's proven that beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.

I'd rather finish 5-7 with a loss to Western Michigan than 3-9 with losses to Mizzoura, Cincinnati and Fresno State.

Honestly, which do you think looks better in the eyes of recruits, the media and everybody else who cares?

We lost to Ohio at home. It's tough to count the Western Michigan game, since the Great Negotiator scheduled that game in freakin Detroit. Nobody's advocating that we start playing a bunch of MAC schools on the road.

True, we should never play a MAC team on the road; I can't imagine what the thought process behind that was. On the other hand, my point is that even with 4 stiffs on the schedule our history indicates we will blow at least one, which leaves us out of a bowl game regardless.

Well, if we had played 4 stiffs at home last year and lost one game, we still would have gone to a bowl. And I think the loss rate is closer to 10% than it is to 25%. There's nothing in our recent history that makes me believe it'd be over 25% (as it would be if we blew "at least one" every year).

For all of Loren Tate's babbling about how St. Guenther LIVES HERE, it is quite ironic that St. Guenther doesn't like to schedule home games.

I agree to an extent - however, you should play a MAC team at Soldier if the opportunity presents itself, but that is it. Heck, I'd even go to a NIU-UI or Miami of Ohio-UI game if Iowa didn't have a home game that weekend. I think it'd be awesome and I love being able to drink beer whilst watching college football, especially when I can walk or take public transit home. C'mon Guenther, schedule one up there in 2011 when your stupid Missourah contract expires...

Northern Illinois plays Wisconsin at Soldier Field in 2011. Hey ralph, if Jake Christensen is still at iowa, do the Hawkeyes beat Northwestern and Ohio State?

Scary thought - Christensen is the last Iowa QB since Brad Banks to beat Northwestern. He had a 1.000 winning percentage against them, better even than Juice's .250. Drew Tate was 0-fer and Stanzi has been 0-fer. I think Jake would have beaten Northwestern because of his timing and familiarity with the offense. However, if he had started at OSU, I think Iowa would have lost by 11 touchdowns.

That's all in the past, the future of B10 football is in the hands of guys like Charest and Vandenberg (I am assuming Forcier will transfer).

In response to Autolykos ("stupidist post comment"). Fortunately I don't get offended easily. My point is their non conference schedule consisted of two BCS teams and a pretty good smaller school in Northern Iowa. Hardly a list of cupcakes as many here advocate. When schedules are made you never know how good some of these teams are going to be. So my point is, Syracuse used to be a Jan 1 bowl program and could have been in 2006 because Iowa probably made their schedule with them a few years earlier. ISU beat a ranked Nebraska team this year and not too long ago was a decent team. So the initial post in this thread suggested that Iowa scheduled 4 guaranteed wins in 2006 and that's how they got to a bowl. There's no way Syracuse and ISU were guaranteed wins when they were scheduled. It just turned out that Syracuse sucked and Iowa beat ISU. In fact, if I remember Iowa played at Syracuse and barely won the game. As further pointed out above, even supposed "guaranteed wins" like San Jose St don't always turn out that well. I don't blame Guenther for the schedule except the Missouri series should be home and home and when he scheduled Cincy, he knew they were good. If you scheduled Cincy today to play them in 2013, they could suck by then. Overall however, two BCS schools (Missouri and Cincy) and two non BCS schools like ISU and Fresno St. is a reasonable schedule most years. If you can't go 3-1 in that scenario then you suck and the problem is not the schedule, but the quality of your team. Finally, I'll remind you all that MSU lost to Central Mich AT HOME and scUM lost to Appalacian St. AT HOME! I'm sure they thought these were guaranteed wins when scheduled too. Bottom line, we should have 7 home games most years and we shouldn't schedule Florida, USC, Texas and Virginia Tech as our four non-conference games. On the other hand, I don't want to see four Illinois States either. Four cupcakes will not build a program. Good recruiting and coaching does. Again, see Minnesota and Glen Mason for his 10 year cupcake approach. He got to a lot of small bowls, never seriously competed in the Big Ten and got fired. Minnesota is no better off today because of it.

Post of the year!

1. No, ISU wasn't a decent team. They're one of the worst programs in the BCS (together with Duke, Vanderbilt and a handful of others, the only programs worse than Illinois over Guenther's tenure). Yeah, they beat Nebraska at NU THIS YEAR - for the first time in over 30 years - because Nebraska had EIGHT turnovers. That doesn't make ISU good (anymore than beating Michigan makes Toledo good). When it was scheduled (and it's not like Iowa has a choice in the matter - they're required to play ISU by the Iowa legislature) no one expected ISU to be anything but awful.

2. As for Syracuse, they haven't been relevant since the late 90s. When the game was scheduled, they weren't even a bowl team.

3. All that doesn't matter, because Guh-unther knew Cincy was a BCS team when he set up the game. He knew we had just gone 5-7. You do the math.

I tend to agree with BZuppke here in the sense that Iowa is a bad example. They typically play at least 2 BCS teams (one of which is always Iowa State) home-and-home every season. While ISU is not a well-run program, it's still a BCS team and the Cyclones get up for the Iowa game more than any other opponent. When you add another BCS home-and-home opponent on top of that, you cannot call that a cupcake schedule in terms of an athletic director's intent. A true cupcake schedule is more along the lines of what Wisconsin has been using lately where they either play 1 low-level BCS team per year or no BCS teams at all in the non-conference schedule.

Anyway, I think that we're on the same page that we need at least 7 home games per year. While I do believe that we need to be in the best position for a bowl, we don't necessarily want 4 complete home game cupcakes per season. As others have mentioned in other threads, we're not a program that's at the point of Michigan or Ohio State where we will sellout games against MAC schools automatically. It behooves us to have at least one attractive non-conference opponent per season as a basis for ticket sales - if people don't buy tickets, then it defeats the financial argument for having more home games in the first place. So, I believe that the optimal non-conference situation would be to schedule Missouri home-and-home, play 2 MAC (or similarly situated schools) at home and then 1 in-state Division I-AA school each season. That's one non-conference rivalry game that will draw fan interest along with 3 winnable home games with an aim toward consistent bowl eligibility.

Iowa State often gives Iowa a tough game and sometimes wins. Between 2005-2008, for example, Iowa lost two games to ISU.

I don't disagree with that (and I don't think many people do). What people are taking exception to is the strength of this year's Illinois schedule. I challenge anyone to find 5 BCS teams that are playing a harder non-con schedule than we are this year. That's just ridiculous given where our program is at and has been at for the last 18 years.

It's just silly to claim that Iowa's 2006 schedule was harder than our schedule, either when scheduled, when played or in light of victories by the program in subsequent years (though I still don't have the foggiest idea why that matters).

Please everyone stop saying this. NO ONE DISPUTES THIS. It doesn't matter what your schedule is, if you don't have a good team. But there is a difference between a "good" team and a "successful" team. We are going to finish with a worse record, and thus be less successful, than many teams that are much worse than us this year. If you are a very good team, you will be successful regardless of your schedule. However, scheduling cupcakes allows you to be successful when your team is just average by B-10 standards. And unfortunately, the money and the top recruits tend to follow success. Unless and until we don't have to worry about having a team with average talent, we should do what we can to make sure that we can win with average talent.

In my internet travels, I have visited many college football forums and message boards.

This is the only board or group of fans that I have seen, that blames their teams lack of success on scheduling.

Face the facts....if we had decent coaching and motivation, we would be bowling and be towards the top of the conference.
As, if stated somewhere else in this forum, we kept Zook,(recruiting), got a decent defensive coordinator and maybe a qb coach, we would be an upper echelon program. We have not had a good head coach since Mike White and even though we may not consistently get 5 star talent, the talent we have is sufficient to be at least an 8-4 program with this years, last years or any other years schedule.

You can't blame the schedule when you don't show up to play.

I don't think any of the teams that are finishing ahead of us, and with better records than us, have looked worse than us on a consistent basis. We have had a couple of good halves. We have consistently played like the worst team in the conference.

I'm not just talking about B10 teams. But I think at least Minnesota and Michigan are worse than us, and I think Purdue is too (I believe we would beat them in Champaign). Indiana is certainly not appreciably better than us.

Also, to your other point, nobody is blaming the team's lack of success solely on scheduling. But when you look around every other conference and see teams with 2 conference wins and 6-4 or 5-5 overall records, you have to wonder why we don't have at least 5 wins (assuming we lose to Cincy).

Also, other fans don't complain about scheduling because they don't have to. Nobody else's AD is that awful. The only schools I know of that had comparable non-conference schedules did well in their non-conference games and thus, had nothing to complain about (e.g., USC, UCLA, Oregon). Washington is the only team I can think of that is comparable to us for having a tough non-conference schedule mess their season up (and yet they still had 7 home games).

6-6 = bowl for Iowa because their fans will be there in flocks.

6-6 = probably no bowl for Illinois because their fans would not travel well after a season like that.

This is partly because the hawkeyes are king in Iowa, but we play football on Sunday in Illinois.

Just the facts.

No, you can't.

However, intelligent scheduling can be the difference between a team being 4-8 or 6-6, or 6-6 and 8-4. Starting off 1-0 instead of 0-1 every year can make a big impact on intangible momentum and confidence, as well as giving a team a chance to work on tangible things like a QB's timing.

Let's say Illinois plays two cupcakes (AT HOME - RON, YOU IDIOT!!!) the first two weeks of the season. Then, you play Mizzou week 3. You should be 2-0. Your offense has had two real games to work together. You're much better prepared for the game. Instead, with our idiotic schedule, the team starts off bad, and it's all downhill from there. It *can* help.

All the top BCS schools do it. It's not like Ron Guenther knows something that Jeremy Foley doesn't.

(We also want to complain about the schedule because we hate Ron Guenther for giving us 81-124-2, and it's something that he is DIRECTLY responsible for. We can at least complain in the delusional hope that it gets this idiot AD fired.)

Here's more "facts." EVERY single team from a major BCS conference in the 2008-2009 season that finished at least 6-6, and hence were bowl eligible, went to a bowl game.

EVERY.
SINGLE.
TEAM.

The only bowl eligible teams in the entire FBS that didn't go were Bowling Green (MAC), Arkansas St (Sun Belt), LA-Lafayette (Sun Belt), and San Jose State (WAC).

An eligible Big Ten team would go to a bowl.

I'm tired of the non-conference scheduling argument. If we had taken care of business against Indiana and Northwestern, both winnable games this year, we would be sitting at 4-4 in conference and 5-5 overall with a bowl game still a distinct possibility.

I've been an Illini fan for 15 years and I've never seen an Illini team that's won every winnable game.

I've missed only one home game in 24 years, and that was because of a heart attack.



If I thought they should win every competitive game, then I would have included the Purdue game, which I didn't. The difference in the Northwestern game was another brain fart ending to the first half, and sleepwalking through the third quarter. That game was very winnable, and I will never accept losing to Indiana in any season.

In retrospect it is hard to believe that we lost to a bad IU team, last in the conference while we beat MI, also last in the conference. Both IU and NW were winnable games. In spite of the injuries this season, this team clearly had the talent to go to a bowl as did the 08 team.

Cheer up everyone. Maybe we'll knock off Cincinnati.

J. Mac went to four straight bowls and never had a losing season. That is not a long tenure at IL but a record you can hardly argue with. I would suggest that White was the last coach who could BOTH coach and recruit. J. Mac was not particularly successful with the latter and it was one of the reasons he left for TX. All the coaches that followed each had big weaknesses in either coaching or recruiting (e.g., Turner, good at X and O but let recruiting slip between Sugar Bowl and getting Rashard near the end).