College football training camps are a like taking your cats to the vet, running into an ex at a bar or exploratory surgery. It’s an inevitable part of life, but if there’s a big story that comes out of it, it is inevitably bad news. Nobody has an awesome story about how the doctors went in to check out that strange spot on the CT scan and discovered a bottle of small batch bourbon growing on their colon.
Similarly, no college football team has a great story about something that happened at training camp. Any huge performance made by a player has to be tempered by the understanding that they were playing against their own teammates, and against a system with which they are intimately familiar. The only big stories to come out of training camps are bad stories, namely injuries to key players or depleted positions.
And so, with great elation I tell you, at the University of Illinois Football training camp at the former Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul … nothing happened.
To be fair to the players, in a basic sense, a lot happened over the course of camp in Rantoul. The football team goes out to the boondocks to get woken up by an air horn at 6:00 a.m. in an economy hotel, just so they can work extremely hard in the hot sun. Note that this is during the two weeks while their college classmates are enjoying the sweet, sweet swan song of parents cooking meals and doing laundry. Training Camp is an immersive environment where conditioning is honed (or not), teammate bonds are formed (or not), and the grind it out mentality necessary for a successful Big Ten season is formed. Or not.
These are intangibles. Whether any of this happened, or didn’t happen, I really can’t tell you. All you can ask for from a training camp (the “tangibles”) is for all of the players to come out healthy. In terms of reportable things, nothing happened. The football team is incredibly, almost unbelievably, healthy leaving the training camp. Key players that missed the Orange and Blue Scrimmage, most notably running back Jason Ford and wide receiver A.J. Jenkins are healthy, and appear to be in fine form for the start of the season. No new injuries came up that are expected to linger into the regular season. Jonathan Brown did not punch anybody (at least not that was reported — large portions of the practices are closed to the media). What more can you ask for?
One thing to report that is not camp related: outside linebacker Ashante Williams is suspended from the team after being arrested for driving under the influence. Trulon Henry, converted from safety, has been practicing in his spot. Williams was not on the camp roster, but more players can be added after classes start, so this is not to say that he is definitively off the team. This is a situation to watch, going forward.
What else can we glean from training camp? If you’re a die-hard Illini fan and have been clamoring for all the training camp coverage you can find, you know this already: the day-to-day coverage of the training camp is mind-bendingly mundane. To paraphrase Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice here. The News Gazette (which, in their defense, have lots of column inches to fill every day, regardless of whether anything happened) were running daily features where the Illini players answer questions such as “Is President Obama getting re-elected?” and “You can have any kind of pet, what’s it going to be?” (Lions and tigers were popular choices.) What is this supposed to tell us? I really don’t know. Maybe we’re supposed to take way that, since a lot of the players answered Jennifer Aniston as their dream date, this is a mature team.
The formal press releases coming out of the University are not much better. The video series put together about the camp includes extended discourses on whether people prefer to walk down 5 concrete stairs or, alternatively, the hill immediately adjacent to said stairs (see Episode 3). Like I said, there’s not much to report here.
But there is something to be said for watching the official DIA training camp videos: they are a glaring reminder that these are college kids, and that is important. They get crab legs and steak for dinner during one game of camp and it is a huge deal to them. Huge. When they are asked questions about what their plans are when they get back to campus, they give college-student answers like “go to Chipotle.”
Or just watch the videos to see Jack Cornell, a senior offensive lineman with a beard that would be the envy of any lumber jack. The guy is genuinely entertaining in addition to being poised in front of the camera, while his teammates freeze into awkward stares, like most college kids. If he doesn’t go on to play at the next level, I sincerely hope Mr. Cornell goes into broadcasting.
Anybody who gets way too wrapped up in college football needs to take a deep breath, watch these videos and make this their new mantra: these are college kids. They’re young, and they’re silly and their having a lot of fun playing a game. Sure the game is important to them, and it is important to us (well, it is to me, and if you’ve read this far, it is to you, too). But as with all things, perspective is invaluable. Watch the videos. See how stoked they get about going to a pool with a water slide. (Episode 4). They’re just college kids. It’s just a game.
Let’s all look forward to a fun season. And if it turns out poorly, it’s just a game. We’ll always have Chipotle.