Welcome in to the Alana Inquirer podcast. It's Jeremy Warner, Joey Wagner.

Happy signing day to everybody who celebrates. It is the early signing period, the first of three days.

And as we know, this is now the day in college football. It's been this way for about six years,

where most of these prospects decide to sign on the dotted line and send in their national

letter of intent. So on today's show, we're streaming live

on our YouTube channel. First time we've tried this out. We've got some new software. We're

trying out here as well, Joey Wagner. We plan on having some special guests along the way

to help us talk about this class, break down this class. Ryan Easterling expected to join

us later. You might get a few of these

signes to join us as well. But right now, Illinois football has the number 42 class in the

country. That would be the highest for Illinois in quite some time. And my stat of the day,

Joey, is this would be the second straight top 50 class for Illinois. That's not a very

high bar when it comes to the Big Ten in all of college football, but for Illinois, that hasn't

happened since 2008, 2009. So we'll break down our individuals, our guys in this class,

positions that they really addressed well and maybe some some question

marks we have in this class but do you have a big takeaway about illinois's class of 2023 yeah i think

i've said this before jeremy but i remember talking we recorded a podcast maybe after last signing day

not not long after last signing day i said hey the class of 20 especially in state, has got a lot of options for headliners.

And Illinois got one in Caden Fagan. I know we'll talk to him out of state. Support Karim is a

headliner. He's a composite four star. And as we know, Jamie, they're still in the mix for Malik.

Elzei, Jair Hill is going to announce later today and what has been a quiet, but kind of a wild ride recruitment. But I think the takeaway is you got to this point, as we record this, one of those in-state headliners, and you built a really good class around them. I mean, this is just kind of what I think of with Brett Bielma classes, right? It's just good football players in this class. They might not have all the rankings. And the rank, we say that, but it's still a better ranking than we've seen in this program for a while. Just a solid class, good three-star players. And you've got a couple headliners sitting there at the top. And I think that's what, that's what should be maybe the, I don't know if expectation is the right word, but maybe what you look for

moving forward in future classes. Yeah, this is kind of what Brett Beulma did at Wisconsin, right?

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