Welcome into the O'Ina Inquirer podcast. Happy June. June 1st today as we record this podcast. It is Jeremy Warner, O'Ina Inquirer, publisher, Joey Wagner,

with us today. We have a fun week of podcasts this week. We have a special guest on Wednesday.

We're really looking forward to for Illinois basketball. And then on Thursday, I'll be chatting

with Tom Fernelli of CBS Sports, get our annual O'Ina Nights takes with Tom Fernelli.

But Joey Wagner, happy June. How are you, buddy? You've had a lot going on in your life here recently. I am good. I fired up the pit boss all weekend. I got that on Saturday afternoon. It is idiot proof, and I am an idiot. So, honestly, you just put it on there and set the time and I was able to

figure that out I did bother those like five people that I know that have one and I was like

texting Jeremy some of the stupid questions I send you take that to my thousand like hey do I

do I how much apple juice do I spritz it with just dumb stuff but it But it's good, man. We got a little dog, too. I was going to say, you lead with the grill or the smoker rather than you have a dog. You have another life in your, in your house there, your new house. Like, what a month. New house, dog, smoker. Yeah, I would imagine he's somewhere in this house, marking his territory as we speak.

So that's going to be fun post pod to go check on how the dog's doing. He's good as a year and a half old, Yorkie, all of four pounds. So we think about four pounds. We've got a vet visit. But yeah, there's not much to the little guy, but he likes people, and we like people. So it's a good fit fit well uh we got a busy month of content ahead

because illinois football has a lot of recruits visiting campus and they only have four commits

so far in this class that is the lowest in the big ten right now lowest ranked recruiting class

of course the caveat is it will be a smaller class joey so if you care the most about the ranking, which includes quantity, probably won't be that high for Illinois.

12 to 18 is what Brett Bielma has previously said.

No, they always find a way to add more guys than they think in the spring.

So probably get up to 20 at some point.

But quality gets so far all in-state recruits with Justin

Johnson, Mason Halloman, Soren Pfeiffer, and Sean Rice. But Joey, they got a lot of work to do in

this class with just four commits so far, even if they only take, say, 12 heading into the season.

They got a lot of work to do in these next three weekends, but they have about 20 prospects coming to visit for the next three weekends. So a lot to play out in the next few weeks. Yeah, they've got a lot of guys coming to campus. What we've seen in the past from Illinois football is you have a lot of guys coming to campus, but you also have a lot of commits coming with them. Guys, you have got on board in the spring in the early summer. That is not as much the case this year. So you're not flanking official visitors with commits and kind of hitting it that way in terms of a recruiting process. So some of those guys, some of those guys will be on campus. And I'm sure, especially the instaters, you can take a little unofficial, come over here, you know, shake hands, meet everybody, do your thing.

But they've got to add some numbers, Jeremy, in the spring.

The April visits weren't as fruitful as we had seen last year.

We kind of knew that those were going to be uphill battles for Illinois

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