On Tuesday, Illinois athletic director Ron Guenther sat down with the media for a 30-minute session. Here's what he had to say:

On his future as AD
“That’s a fair question. What I’ve agreed to is extend the contract through this academic year (it was to expire in December) and that may go into the summer.”

On staying beyond the school year
“There are projects to be done, on one hand. When you look at the other side of the ledger, there’s administrative change. When administrative changes and you’ve got a new board, it may be a good time to make a change in my chair as well. The key word for me if we move on is some kind of succession plan. I just hope that we can be up front and try to work through that in the next several months.”

On Ron Zook’s changes
“I give Ron a lot of credit. When we finished the season last year, we had to have some real heart-to-heart talks. I didn’t like what happened. He didn’t like what happened. I had a lot of people telling me, ‘Let’s make that change.’ What we did was dissect his program. The first step was for Coach to get introspective. My challenge was, ‘What do you do well? What do you do poorly? Where do you think it fell apart?’ It was a radical change. We decided he needed experience. He needed time-tested people. We were very fortunate to locate two coordinators who had experience.”

On football expectations
“I think the amount of progress that program has made since the day the season ended is more progress than I’ve seen in any program I’ve been affiliated with. The question is, ‘How good are we?’ I’m very excited to be part of this week. We’ll just see if it works. My expectation is we’ll be better. I’m expecting more games to be won. I would like this team to be more competitive than it was last year.”

On Big Ten alignment
“We’re pretty close. We’ve got it narrowed down to a couple models. I think the idea was that we could get that to the public as fast as possible. We’ve been working on scheduling within the two models. We haven’t even agreed on what the division is called. In 2015, we’ll look at a nine-game schedule. Everybody agreed from the beginning that we were going to look at competitive equality as the first piece of this. We all have a dog in the fight. Everybody was looking for an angle, possibly. But I really think in the end we ended up with two models that work.”

On the continuation of football rivalries
“The key was to come up with one rival. There are more than one rival game. Even Illinois, we had the Northwestern Lincoln Trophy, we had the Illibuck and we had the Cannon. Everybody had more than one. What we had to do was put it on a matrix and try to decide what were the rival games. Let’s commit to one rival game.”

On the Assembly Hall renovation
“We’ve had that thing on the rocket pad for a while. We definitely know that this building is in good condition and that we’re going to renovate it. We also know that renovation can take place in stages. Now, the question becomes the funding model. The funding model in that building is going to be different than the funding model we used (at Memorial Stadium). At least a third of that building cost is going to come through a corporate naming opportunity. I feel we’ve made progress there.”

On new UI President Michael Hogan
“We met a week ago on Tuesday. Then, promptly on Wednesday, he wanted a tour of the football facilities. He’s a real personable guy, and he’s got a lot of energy. I think he’s got a lot of interest in our department. Then, he addressed the football team. I thought we lost them when he said he played and still held some records over in Iowa. But he brought it back to say he was one of the slowest, smallest guys to ever play.”