Indiana Football opens its 2022 campaign on a Friday night in Bloomington, when the Illini come to town on September 7th.
This will be year two of the Bret Bielema experiment at Illinois, but he definitely did turn some heads last season with an up and down year that featured wins over Penn State (in the most Big Ten football game of all time) and Minnesota next to losses to Rutgers and UTSA.
Illinois had been in such a low place prior to Bielema’s arrival that the five win 2021 campaign was a marked improvement over the Lovie Smith era, which was just getting started when Indiana last played Illinois in 2017.