Welcome in to the online inquire podcast. It is Jeremy Warder and Joey Wagner. Let's move along here in our Illinois football position previews for the 2025 season.

And on the offense, I think we're combining the two biggest question marks.

A lot of intrigue during training camp about both the wide receivers and the tight ends.

A lot of new faces in here, both through the transfer portal and through

high school recruiting, but also some major question marks because the major question mark,

I was just on with Mike Hall of Big Ten Network, and he asked me what the big question about

this team is, and I said, who's catching passes from Luke Altmyer, Joey? And we have written

a lot about it. You and I were just talking.

It feels like we're being repetitive every day in our notes that we're having something new on receivers and tight ends.

But there should be.

On a team that has a lot of questions already answered coming into the year, wide receiver tight end are two of the biggest question marks.

Just who is going to be targeted

and who is going to catch passes from your top tier Big Ten quarterback.

Yeah, and there's a little bit of overlap and construction and layout of the room, right?

T. And Arkin returns the most experience of the both of the two rooms, but you have a couple

familiar faces in a wide receiver with Malik Elsey, with Colin Dixon, with Alexander Capka Jones, Hank Beatty, and then tied in, you've got the overlap of Tanner Arkin, and Cole Rusk, I do think there's value for his overlap of being there for a year, but not a lot on the field. We'll get into that, Jeremy, but Barry Lundy pointed it out in the first media, in the first press conference we had with him, how similar they were in the construction. And it didn't really dawn on me until that moment. And, yeah, there's some similarities there. Yeah, and the one thing is, like, it's not like Illinois didn't attack these two positions, right, in these two question marks. They didn't just say, oh, we're good, we're just going to develop the guys we have, and, you know, they're going to plug in and play. It was, no, let's go get Justin Bowdoch and Hudson Clement, a wide receiver. Let's go get Davenstaffel and Christian Abney at tight end. So we'll dive into all of that. but let's start with a wide receiver group, Joey.

And it feels like we've got to start with what last year was.

Two more NFL receivers.

Illinois just had four NFL receivers in two seasons.

Kudos to Barry Loney.

Kudos to George McDonald.

Kudos to Justin Stepp.

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