Who provides Chicago football fans with their cheap thrills for the season?

Fans of the gridiron are having their share of potential thrills, along with disappointments, now that we’re at the time of year in which the bowl games are being played.

Will the Chicago Bears still be relevant when the Super Bowl comes to Atlanta?

We’ll have to see just how the Chicago Bears fare – with some fans being delusional enough to think this is the year of a Super Bowl championship.

OF COURSE, THIS could just as easily be the year the Bears get knocked out of the playoffs in the first round when they take on the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.

In which case, this could easily turn out to be the season where all of the big-time football teams managed to fall short.

After all, Notre Dame is the team that lost only one game this season and qualified for the Cotton Bowl – which theoretically could have put them in contention for the national title for college football.

But the Fighting Irish managed to get walloped in that game against Clemson – thereby reinforcing the attitude felt amongst many that Notre Dame’s days of being a college football power are all long in the past.

IF THE BEARS manage to get knocked out early in the playoff rounds, the disappointment would be comparable to that of Notre Dame.

Sad sack of Chicago-area football; or can we just write them off as Hoosiers?

Which is where Northwestern University comes in. The suburban Evanston-based school that likes to market itself as “Chicago’s Big 10 Team” fell short of winning the Big 10 conference title – losing to Ohio State, which on Tuesday won the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. But they did get one of the lesser bowl games, and managed to win.

A 31-20 victory over Utah in the Holiday Bowl – which means the Wildcats got a trip to San Diego. While we got soggy wet on New Year’s Eve, they got California sunshine just as they would have if they had managed to prevail against the Buckeyes in Indianapolis.

Was the one-time Dyche Stadium the place where most interesting football of 2018 was played?

It could turn out to be the highlight of Chicago-area football for the season – unless the Bears truly are capable of going on a winning streak to take them all the way to a Super Bowl victory in Atlanta on Feb. 3 – which could show that the 12-4 record they achieved this year wasn’t a complete fluke and that the only fluke of the year may well have been Notre Dame.

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EXTRA: Can Lovie Smith make Fighting Illini football relevant again?

So what would Lovie Smith’s legacy on our local sports scene become if it turns out that the Texas native becomes the man who led the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl AND the University of Illinois to a Rose Bowl?

From the 'blue and orange' to 'orange and blue'

Although considering that many don’t think Smith deserves that much praise for his eight-year stint as Bears coach (he lost the Super Bowl to those overgrown hick Hoosiers down in Indianapolis, after all), I wonder if any success he has in Champaign, Ill., won’t amount to much.

FOR IT WAS announced Monday that the guy who recently lost his job as coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is employed again – he signed a six-year deal with our state’s alleged flagship university to coach the Big 10 football program that is considered by many sports observers to be the equivalent of the Chicago Cubs of college football.

At $21 million for those six years, it has been pointed out that Smith will be the highest-paid person on a public payroll in Illinois – although it also seems he will be getting less money than he was for coaching Tampa Bay.

So much for our society’s priorities when it comes to compensation.

Although I’m also sure that if Smith manages to make Illinois relevant again when it comes to college football, no one will begrudge the pay Lovie will receive in coming years.

BESIDES, I’M SURE some people are going to say (only semi-jokingly) that Smith will have to live in Champaign, Ill. (or perhaps Urbana?), and that the deserves to get something in return for being compelled to live in that central Illinois community.

Although I’d wonder what he’d wind up spending his salary on – there just isn’t that much to do in the college town community.

Particularly since Fighting Illini football often gives off the aura of something small-town based that nobody living outside of Champaign really cares about. Particularly if someone in question went to college elsewhere. Our alma maters create more interest than anything happening in Champaign.

Fighting Illini football most definitely lacking in legacy

I wonder at times if Michigan or Ohio State have more fans in Chicago than the Illini?

CREATING INTEREST IN Illinois football within Chicago could be Smith’s greatest achievement. Taking into account he was once an assistant coach for a Super Bowl-bound St. Louis Rams team, it makes me wonder if he could help spur interest across the whole state.

Could the University of Illinois seriously become the team all of Illinois roots for – and could even become the unifying factor of all those Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals fans who couldn’t ever envision having a rooting interest in common!

If Lovie can really achieve that, then our sports fans may start to respect him in ways that his Super Bowl appearance didn’t accomplish.

But the bottom line is a win – he’d better bring a Rose Bowl victory  (or perhaps even a Bowl Championship Series title) to the Land of Lincoln, or else we’ll think of him as just another part of a string of failed coaches who took the reins in Champaign throughout the years.

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Bring back the Maroons! It makes more sense than having SIU in Big Ten

Every year in the Illinois General Assembly manages to bring about a bill or two that gets a lot of attention just because the idea being espoused is so knuckleheaded and absurd that we know it’s going nowhere.

Not a ringing endorsement for Ill. flagship

This year, it seems the nonsense bill in question is one based upon the idea that Illinois needs to improve its educational opportunities for students by getting another of its public universities into the Big Ten.

AS IF WE don’t suffer enough by seeing Fighting Illini and Wildcats sports teams get their behinds kicked by Michigan, Ohio State and Indiana, state representatives Michael Connelly, R-Lisle, and Matt Murphy, R-Palatine, somehow think that having the Illinois State Redbirds or the Cougars of Southern Illinois-Edwardsville in the mix will bolster things.

This is just ridiculous on so many levels. But let’s take the key point that Connelly made in talking to the Chicago Sun-Times about this issue. “”Big Ten,’ to me, means a top state school. There’s a lot of pride in that. The Big Ten has a cachet and a record of higher academic and athletic excellence.”

Now I’m not looking to go on a diatribe against the University of Illinois. I have known many people (including my brother, Chris) who were educated there. It’s a fine place. But that statement from Connelly is just a bunch of hooey!

The reason some people choose to attend universities elsewhere is because they have achieved such standards and reputations that those top students want to challenge themselves (either that, or they have “legacy” connections that get them in).



MURPHY: Placing too much faith...

WE ALL KNOW it’s not 100 percent accurate to recall Tom Cruise’s “Joel” character from “Risky Business” and his reaction to learning he probably wasn’t going to be accepted to Princeton. But the Urbana-Champaign campus doesn’t really get bonus points academically because it’s in the Big Ten conference.

And the Big Ten sure doesn’t get much respect athletically when compared to the other major conferences that comprise the world of NCAA Division I sports.

Somehow, I suspect some alum of an SEC school is laughing his behind off at the thought of the Big Ten being elite. Then again, some of those alums may not be literate enough to read this commentary, so who knows how they will react. And as for the Ivy League types, their snootiness lets me easily disregard them.



CONNELLY: ... in Big Ten label?

I just think that some people are equating an athletic conference with way too much significance. And in the case of the Big Ten, it doesn’t help that their latest expansion efforts have been to get into the big media markets. That is, if you think of Rutgers as New York-area and Maryland as Washington, D.C.

THE ONLY WAY I could see the Big Ten wanting a third Illinois-based academic institution is if it would put them in Chicago proper (Northwestern University is, after all, based in suburban Evanston). I just can’t see them caring about Normal, Ill., or suburban St. Louis (as in Edwardsville). And don’t even bring up the main campus in Carbondale – a place so isolated physically it makes Champaign seem cosmopolitan.

Besides, what does any of this have to do with academics? Connelly and Murphy say their concern is that University of Illinois standards have become too high and many students get rejected.

How about working on ways to bolster the level of the other state-funded public universities? Which has nothing to do with the Big Ten label.

There’s also the fact that Connelly and Murphy think that students rejected by Illinois are going to other states, and not coming back. Yet how often do we hear about University of Michigan (or other Midwestern university) alumni who beehive it straight for Chicago once they graduate?

SO WHAT COULD this all mean? Probably nothing. The bill that already has made it through a state Senate committee calls for a commission to spend a year studying the issue – if it even gets approved. Nobody is bound to do anything.

Which means we’re not likely to ever see anything actually happen with this. Not even a return of the one Chicago university that actually has a Big Ten history.

The Stagg Field of old (and its Big Ten memories) are long gone from Hyde Park neighborhood campus. Illustration provided by Chuckman Chicago Nostalgia.

Restore the Chicago Maroons to the athletic conference for the first time since the late 1930s? I doubt it, largely because university officials themselves would see the Big Ten as a hindrance to their academic mission!

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