CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — After being one of the last teams in the country to have their first bye week, the Illini finally get the week off after playing seven straight games to start the season.
For a team that’s
had its fair share of injuries, depth concerns and hard-fought battles, Illinois is certainly going to make the most of some well-deserved time off.
Head coach Bret Bielema stressed the point that not only will the bye week help with recovery for his players, it will also help them get a jump start on looking ahead to their next match-up against the Washington Huskies.
“We got some good work in this week, obviously a very talented team in Washington, we’ll watch them play this week in a very tough Big Ten game for them as well,” Bielema said. ‘We’re taking the best use of this bye week, and hopefully converting it into some positives for us next week.”
Last time out, the Illini fell to the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes in front of their home crowd. It was their second loss of the season, both of which came against top-three teams in the latest AP Poll.
In Bielema’s eyes, the bye week allows his guys to look back on those losses and find ways to build off of them, rather than pushing them off.
“We’re a 5-2 football team that took advantage of five Saturdays and left two in a way that we know we need to improve on,” Bielema said. “We can’t just ignore those, we gotta understand why we had failure and make sure we don’t repeat it.”
Illinois will make the cross-country trip to take on Washington on Oct. 25, meaning that they’ll have a lot of time to scout out their talented conference rival.
However, in terms of preparing for what lies ahead after the bye week, the Illini have the unique opportunity to not just focus on their next game against Washington, but also the remainder of their schedule.
“They’re going to watch our game we have coming up, but we also have four other Big Ten games on the horizon, so to have this weekend to watch other people work, I think is a neat view of it,” Bielema said.
This season, the Illini have gotten more representation from the national media than in any year in recent memory.
FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff has rolled into Champaign twice.
The team has had opportunities to duke it out against a slew of top-tier opponents and has helped spur national debates about the Big Ten’s dominance as a conference.
Up until this most recent AP Poll came out, Illinois had been ranked in every single one, and will have the opportunity to almost certainly move back in with a win against Washington.
But despite all of this noise and chatter, Bielema and the Illini have remained level-headed and disciplined, something they’ll look to continue for the rest of their 2025 season.
“All we’ve got to do is worry about what’s in front of us,” Bielema said. “We can’t worry about what people view on the outside world, we gotta worry about us, and I think our group is locked into that pretty good.”
