Rick Considine

There were 2,500 pigs on the farm. The chores were simple and they never stopped. Feed them. Clean them. Scrape the lots. Do it before school, then do it again after school. Yesterday the kid who did those chores coached his team to the biggest win of their season. This morning his father was gone. His name is Bret Bielema. Start with his dad, because none of the rest of it happens without his dad and that farm. Arnie Bielema sold sporting goods for a living. Before Bret started grade school he moved the family out to a pig farm outside Prophetstown, in northern Illinois, and put all five of his kids to work on it. Here is how Arnie described the way they ran it. "Whatever came up in the line of duties, we worked together." Here is how Bret described his own job on it. "Anything that made the pigs survive." He played tight end and linebacker for the high school in town, and he went 31 and 2 on the wrestling mat as a senior. Nobody offered him a football scholarship. But his father sold sporting goods, and men who sell sporting goods know people. Those connections got Bret into the summer camps at Iowa. That is how Hayden Fry saw him. He walked on at Iowa in 1989 as a defensive lineman. He earned a scholarship, which he later said he needed just to stay enrolled. He lettered four years. By his senior season his teammates had made him captain. He went undrafted, got cut by Seattle, and spent a year in the Arena Football League in Milwaukee. Then he started coaching and did not stop. Graduate assistant at Iowa. Kansas State. Wisconsin, where he went 68 and 24, took three straight Big Ten titles and reached three straight Rose Bowls. Arkansas fired him in 2017. He went to New England and got a Super Bowl ring. In 2021 Illinois hired him, which is the school in his own state. Yesterday Oregon came to Champaign. Oregon had been the number two team in America in the preseason. Illinois had to start a freshman quarterback named Michael Clayton II in the first start of his life, because the starter was hurt. Illinois 21, Oregon 10. Then this morning the school released a statement from him. "I was grateful to go see him on Thursday night and Friday morning of this past week and spend a memorable last time with him." Be straight about the last four years of his life. In November of 2022 his mother Marilyn was gone, and he flew to Michigan and coached the next day. His wife's father was gone a few days after that. And Illinois is 4 and 3 right now. But on that farm, the reward for getting through a hard week was Sunday afternoon golf with his dad.