I wrote a very long post today about the Nebraska basketball game.  Came back and edited it 3 times.  Probably spent a couple hours on it.  And I just deleted it all.  Because I heard some football recruiting news, and it hurt.  So I deleted the words that came from my head – now it’s time to write from the heart.  That post took 3 hours.  This will probably take 25 minutes.

(Seriously – my fingers can’t go fast enough right now.  I’m hammering at this keyboard like harder keystrokes will make the words bold or something.)

Here’s where I’m at: Logan Tuley-Tillman, a 4-star offensive lineman from Peoria, a manchild we could place at left tackle for 4 years, the guy I was prepping an all-out LTT4LT blog campaign over the next 11 months… just committed to Michigan.  Over before it even began.  Michigan played the “we’re running out of spots” card IN FEBRUARY and got him to verbal. A kid who said in December that he “grew up cheering the Illini” is now off to Michigan to wear those putrid helmets.  I’m sick.  But that’s not all.

Kyle Bosch, a kid who had all kinds of family connections to Champaign – I believe his grandfather played linebacker at Illinois and many members of his family attended UIUC, but I’m too fired up right now to go research that and see if it’s correct – also committed to Michigan this weekend.  Two 4-star offensive tackles in the 2013 class – a position where we need at least 3 blue-chippers in the next class – and both of them gone.  In FEBRUARY.

This should not come as a surprise.  This has happened each of the last 40 years.  Michigan and Ohio State and other top tier programs will always come into this state and steal the best kids.  That’s just the way it is.  I don’t like it, I’ll throw a fit every time it happens, but it is what it is. My job as an Illini football fan is to accept it.

But that’s not what has me so upset tonight.  It’s the football recruiting news combined with a 23-point basketball loss to Nebraska.  Nebraska.  A football school.  A school that can swoop in to Corey Cooper’s living room and steal him away just because they’re Nebraska Football.  They don’t care about basketball.  They’ll never recruit.  They don’t stand a chance.  But that’s OK – they can will themselves to football victories because of their fan support and their history.

At the end of the Bill Self era, that was us in basketball.  Would Nebraska have the opportunity to walk into Charlie Villanueva’s living room and steal him away to Lincoln?  Not a chance.  But Bill Self did.  And he did that with Illinois Basketball on his polo.  We were built into a national brand – one of the top 12 programs in America.  WE were the power program that could expect to recruit with the big boys.  You know how Iowa and Iowa State fans lamented the fact that North Carolina could just walk in and steal Harrison Barnes away?  That’s the type of program we were.  We could will ourselves to basketball victories because of our fan support and our history, and Iowa or Minnesota fans could only sit back and – as I’m doing tonight – say “well, they ARE Illinois Basketball; it’s tough to recruit against that.”

And now we WERE Illinois Basketball.  And it’s killing me tonight.  Brady Hoke sends two daggers straight to my heart, and I reach for my basketball balm, and it’s empty.  We just lost to a football school by 23.  We’re going to miss the tournament for the third time in six years, and if you add one more loss to two of those years, we’d be missing the tournament for the fifth time in six years. And now, the big-time in-state recruits in 2013 will likely look elsewhere.

We’re always going to be behind in football.  That’s just the way it is.  I’ll never stop dreaming, and I’ll never stop hoping, and I’ll never stop writing 19 point plans for ways we can build a vibrant football program at the University of Illinois, but I’m realistic.  There’s a ceiling.

There’s no ceiling for the basketball program.  Everything is in place.  History.  Fan support.  Recruiting base.  In the same way that Michigan was always going to return to football dominance, and Nebraska was always going to rebound from the Bill Callahan era, Illinois Basketball MUST regain it’s rightful place.  There are 344 Division I basketball programs, and 330 of them don’t have the resources that we have.  No, it won’t take “locking down Chicago” to successfully recruit.  As Rick Morrissey suggested in the Sun Times today, we simply need to find the right coach and build around him.

In football, I believe we’ve found the right coach to lay the foundations.  He’s a program builder, he understands that it takes effortless recruiting, and although I’m certain he’s disappointed tonight, he knows that it will take 5 years of relationship building and bowl game trips before we can hope to recruit with the big boys.

In basketball, it is absolutely crucial that we don’t whiff on a Thad Matta this time.  We MUST find the right man to lead us.  There’s too much at stake.  We can’t fade any more from the height that this program reached in 2005.  The goal has to be national championships.

Football needs a 19 point plan.  Basketball needs one.  Find us the right coach, Mike Thomas.