SI Daily: A Day in Champaign Without Big Ten Football

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.— Last Thursday, the Big Ten football season was supposed to kick off in Champaign, Ill., with the host Illini taking on an Ohio State team that might be the best in the nation.

A few hours prior to game time, Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman sat on a third-row aluminum bleacher in the corner of Illinois’s Memorial Stadium, gazing at the emptiness, pondering time and place. He played here 20 years ago, and today he is the school’s athletic director. Red Grange ran and Dick Butkus tackled in this grand old edifice, which is flanked on the east and west sides by towering columns inscribed with the names of Illinoisans killed in World War I.

Now, for the first autumn in 97 years, no football is expected to be played in this historic stadium. “We would be getting ready to go right now, wouldn’t we?” Whitman says wistfully.

They would indeed. It was 5 p.m. last Thursday, the day when the Illini were scheduled to play Ohio State here in the first Power 5 football game of the 2020 season. It would have been an idyllic college football game day — crisp and sunny in the afternoon, with a cool breeze picking up toward nightfall. Even with reduced stadium attendance, the town and campus would have hummed with a long-absent energy.

The football cravings are going unfulfilled these virus-plagued days in Big Ten country, and beyond. The schedule will expand going forward nationally, but not locally. Not here. In a town of 90,000 that revolves around a university of about 34,000 students, this is one more civic blow.

Indiana was supposed to play at Wisconsin last Friday, and Penn State was supposed to arrive to Bloomington this weekend. Instead, there's no football.

Sports Illustrated's Pat Forde spent the day in Champaign last week, and chronicled the effect that no football will have on college towns.

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