I know a lot of Chicago area people that love the Illini. You just hate the school.

Chicago has a lot of Big Ten alumni so it's not as in your face though like it is when you go to Iowa and everyone there has an Iowa hat.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I'm sure we've been over this a thousand times on this board but I would say anything south of Ottawa or Kankakee can reasonably called downstate -- "central Illinois" is just another part of downstate. Rockford and other places that aren't Chicago are just northern Illinois. Galena is more accurately in the Driftless Area but it's not not northern Illinois.

I think a lot of people here were really into Illini hoops the year they were undefeated late into the season and almost won a national championship but who wouldn't be? Obviously the state's flagship university has a good number of fans in the state's major population center, but it doesn't compare with other states for various cultural/geographic/demographic reasons. But back to the topic at hand, which is Chicago media coverage of these little college-sports fiefdoms, I feel like we're at a place with college sports fandom that people who crave that sort of coverage are getting it somewhere online, whether it's SBNation blogs or podcasts or anything where you're among friends in a way that you wouldn't be with the Score as currently constituted.

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I love college sports but anything more than a weekly guest like Gerry Dinardo is too much. Just like national NBA, leave it to the guys who know it.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yeah, I think you're right. Anything more than a weekly around-the-Big-Ten segment is going to turn people off. If they think the local team that won three championships this decade will chase listeners away, I can't imagine what routine deep dives on Michigan State's offense would do.

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Don't take it personally.

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

I don't know what I like better: that JORR took and posted this photo in real time or that he has a trove of selfies flipping people off for any occasion.

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Looks like JORR still has some of his ex-wive's art available if anyone is interested.

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Anything south of Joliet is basically Alabama.

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delaney

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

The art on display costs about $250K

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I just get the feeling that a weighted-down body lies five hundred feet behind him in that lake...

My favorite JORR selfie is the one he sent in has bathroom to the guy that sent him one. Made me laugh pretty hard.

Having lived upstate for 25+ years now, the definition that I hear most often is anything west of 47 and/or south of 80 is downstate.

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You know me like that.

Take THAT west side of Elburn!

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As a veteran of some long drives down 47 (120 north of the border), I'll buy that as the western frontier of the metropolis, but I-80 as the southern limit puts Homewood and Flossmoor downstate, and Laurence Holmes is no downstater in my book.

Kankakee is either the southernmost part of Chicagoland or the northernmost part of downstate.

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Bunch of cookie-cutter (but affluent) suburbs are really far south these days...Frankfort and beyond.