Tim Beckman Attracts Solid Recruiting Class, Wants The Media To Be Nicer

(CBS) Illinois football inked its 2015 recruiting class Wednesday on national signing day, attracting what Rivals.com ranked as the sixth-best class in the 14-team Big Ten as of mid-afternoon. It was also ranked 46th nationally.

Given the coaching staff has been in flux and the Illini's struggles in the Big Ten, it was a solid job by coach Tim Beckman and company. Now in his fourth year at Illinois, it's the best class Beckman has landed, per Rivals.com, and markedly better than last year's group that was slotted 75th nationally. Which is why part of Beckman's press conference message was so puzzling.

Near the end of his question-and-answer session, Beckman challenged the media to be more positive about Illinois football, which has gone 12-25 in Beckman's three years and hasn't finished better than fifth in its conference division.

Here are Beckman's thoughts.

(Yes, they're verbatim.)

"And last, I'm going to leave this up to you guys," Beckman said. "OK -- we're all in this state. We all want to build the best football team that we can. We want to build champions and be a consistent champion. OK? So I'm going to put it on you. What are they reading? K. Social media's big nowadays. What are ya saying? What are ya saying? Well, I can say that we've gotten better every year. K. I can say our academic standards have gone skyrocket. I can say that our young men in this program right now are doing what's they need to do to be successful in life. Mmk. So the challenge again, as I said after that Northwestern game (a win in regular-season finale), the challenge is still how important is the University of Illinois to you? Because it's very, very important to us, and we know that we can be successful if we're all in it together. Because our intentions are to build a champion.

"If they want to build champions, we're all in this together," Beckman added. "Not everybody's going to see the same thing, but I think as much positive stuff as we can continue to broadcast about this great institution and the athletic programs that we have and how our athletic programs are moving forward in really every category of sports that we play, what we're doing academically, I think there's a lot of things that you can talk about positively with this program.

"Everybody, let's build this thing into a championship. The more positive stuff you can talk about, the better off we all are."