Rivalries are crucial to the sport of college football. They make regular season games feel like championships, they make winning better and losing worse.
For Illinois football, rivalries will be a tough thing to come by. Northwestern is the in-state team and rival the Illini play for rivalry week, but that just feels like an automatic win for the next couple of years. That is not what a rivalry should feel like. The Braggin’ Rights against Mizzou game is coming back a handful of times from 2026-35, which will be big for rivalry purposes, but until then, there could be a different team taking its place.