Nothing beats a winning football team
SEATTLE -- Two words told quite a story Saturday morning in an O'Hare men's room across from Gate B10.
"Go Illini!" the man rejoiced after seeing I was wearing an Illinois baseball cap.
He wasn't excited about the Fighting Illini's basketball victory over Hawaii the night before.
For the first time in years this exchange was about football, even before I arrived here for today's Bears game, to learn Illinois had beaten Northwestern.
The big sighs you hear in rest rooms around Champaign belong to relieved Illinois administrators. The best news they could hear is that Illini supporters are talking football in saloons, offices and johns.
Last week's upset of No. 1 Ohio State, the finishing touch over Northwestern, the 9-3 regular-season record … well, success came at just the right time.
As in, "Chief Who?"
You see, collegiate athletics aren't games anymore. Maybe they never were, but now more than ever they are business strategies and university fund-raisers.
A quality football program is higher education's best marketing tool. Yes, even better than a Final Four basketball team or a revered mascot/symbol/soul.
The impression for a decade was monetary considerations compelled Illinois administrators to delay whacking Chief Illiniwek.
Upsetting alumni and assorted other boosters is considered bad form and worse business, you know.
Donations to the university are in jeopardy when an issue like the Chief's future is in the balance. Or that's the fear.
I didn't believe it even when fellow alums insisted to me they wouldn't give the university any money anymore.
Heck, many thought Indiana University was going to become a barber college once mascot, er, basketball coach Bobby Knight was fired.
Never happened. Good public universities like Indiana and great ones like Illinois -- yes, I'm an Illinois alum -- aren't built upon an athletic foundation. They're built upon an academic foundation.
Still, there remained a persistent school of thought, so to speak, that flunking out Chief Illiniwek would prompt vindictive donors to stuff their tax deductions elsewhere.
To avoid even a remote chance of that, a state school will suspend good sense, compromise principles and allow a student to wear a costume offensive to a segment of the state's public.
As the Illini victory over Ohio State indicated, nothing in higher education is more emotional or compelling than athletics and the rituals surrounding them.
Suddenly, Illini supporters of the Chief had a mood swing. Some of them even wore "Chief" merchandise while greeting the football team when it returned from Columbus.
The demise of the Chief wasn't forgiven. But maybe football rendered it forgotten for a while. Apparently compromising beliefs can work both ways.
About an hour after the game in Columbus ended, an e-mail arrived from a former classmate now living on the West Coast.
The gist was "Juice!" 108 times -- nine rows across and 12 down -- in honor of the Illinois quarterback who threw 4 touchdown passes against Ohio State.
To my friend, for now Juice Williams replaced Chief Illiniwek as an Illini icon. Alums in general are back on the bus to Champaign with open minds and checkbooks.
Season-ticket sales will zoom for next year's home schedule, too, because a winning football program trumps any possible impact of terminating the Chief.
Illinois administrators can rest easy now because business will be better than ever.
mimrem@dailyherald.com