Illinois' football season starts in eight days.
Tim Beckman expressed his excitement about this fact at 12:35 on Friday afternoon.
Not forty minutes later, Tim Beckman was fired by Illinois AD Mike Thomas. Again, eight days before the season opener.
Dismissals with this kind of timing are rare, and for good reason—it means the athletic director determined that the coach's presence was worse than the chaos of no permanent head coach at all, that the head coach had become a bad agent and the program's security depended on him being gone immediately. That's a hell of a charge, way beyond the Xs and Os or Ws and Ls, and one the vast majority of athletic directors who fire their coaches don't make.