Standing at 2-6, with a win over longtime rival Michigan and long time cellar dweller Indiana, the Illini have lived up to their billing of being the most unpredictable and bi-polar football teams in the game. Sure you could write the whole thing off as something as petty as "inconsistency" but I submit that it is something else. The Illini are the most extreme example of a feast and famine-manic depressive type of team. When things are going good for the Illini they can unload an hellacious amount of offense on to an opponent making them look positively superb in the process. There is of course a seemingly equal opportunity for the team to sputter and fail utterly, and in the process lose to teams like Indiana.

Its living life on the margins of football. It would seem to me impossible for this team to be just mediocre. It seems like it is built to explode, either in a good way or bad. Every game seems like it is just a domino rally that will either fall to one side or the other depending on how a simple small event dictates it. Maybe that's why Zook has been looking for that spark, something to get things rolling, because he knows when the boulder of offense is rolling in one direction it is impossible to stop.

It is perhaps what makes Zook the most dangerous and unpredictable coach in the league. His team's have the capacity to spiral downward to the point where a win over them is valueless, and the talent to jump up and crush a team with many more wins.  The Illini are now a pure destructive force offering only a lose-lose to opponents, no real benefit to beating them , but an infinite downside to losing. Like Rich Rod has already learned, Ron Zook and the Fighting Illini are now the most dangerous team left on anyone's schedule. A loss to the Illini is akin to the toxic assets that sunk the housing credit market, it can annihilate the rating of any who take it on.

Minnesota, Northwestern, Cincinnati and Fresno beware, for all intents and purposes, the Illini have swine flu, and are highly contagious. If you happen to get by them unscathed then good for you, but if you are infected with a loss, enjoy being saddled with the combined weight of our 6 really bad losses.

it is in a way kind of scary the amount of power Zook has right now. If what I have been hearing from Michigan fans is correct, the Illini game could be the tipping point that ends the Rich Rod era in Michigan, all the while Ron Zook's own job security is still in doubt. We forget, perhaps, as fans that not only can we not predict when and how the Illini show up, neither can any of the opponents.

Expectations for a bowl are pretty much gone, but the possibility of ruining the season of some of the other opponents on the schedule does have some fan appeal, especially knowing that at any moment the Illini could explode for a 400 yard half. At the very least, it makes me want to watch the game against Cincy a hell of a lot more.