Tom Fornelli

speaker

217 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Tom Fornelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Eye On College Basketball · Summer Shootaround: Frenemy of the pod Tom Fornelli stops by to discuss Illinois’ case as the best team in CBB 🟠🔵 · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, I mean, that is changing a little bit on the football side.

Like Brett Bielema and that program have been more, have just been better than Illinois football really has been at any point really in like 50, 60 years since like maybe pre-World War I, pre-World War II.

But it was like, for the most part, growing up, Illinois football, when I was there, like we had a very good season.

Like when I showed up in Champaign, they went to the Share Bowl that one year.

And I was like, wow, this is great.

And then the basketball team was really good at the same time too.

I'm like, this is just what it's like to be an Illinois sports fan, I guess.

But football, most part, it's really just been something to kind of kill time until basketball starts.

And that was what kind of, yeah, it made it a little more difficult during those lean years in the basketball program because the football team just really wasn't doing anything to distract you.

So it was just kind of like sad to be an Illinois sports fan for a while there.

I mean,

typically not spectacular like the the results aren't spectacular failures like i would say that you know they're they're still like when they're expected to be good they're good it's just they're not typically elite and it's like if you look like you mentioned they're probably not going to be number one to start the year but they'll probably be like top five in the ap poll i'm guessing definitely i don't think there's probably i don't think there's any conceivable way they're not top five and they're probably going to be top three

yeah and that'd be the first time we stopped in the start started in the top 10 at all since the 2020 season after you know the covet year we started eight and we finished you know number two in the final eight people but like even going back like the last time before that when we were top five was the 2005 season that went pretty well until we got to north carolina in the title game okay

And then before that, I was still on campus at the time.

We began the year number three in the 2001-2002 season.

Bill Self, that was his second season, did not really live up to it.

We finished 13th in the AP poll.

We lost, I think, in the round of 32 that year as a four seed.

So that was kind of a disappointing season.

We haven't really followed through on winning the Big Ten most of the time.

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