Now that Illinois has won two consecutive games against ranked opponents for the first time since 2001, there are a lot of things being said about the program.

But make sure one of them won’t be “letdown.”

With two significant victories and a subsequent appearance in the rankings, for the first time since that Sugar Bowl run Illinois will be the team facing a letdown instead of hoping to provide one.

While I cannot believe Iowa will come away with a victory this weekend given how well Illinois is playing, it stands to reason there may be the possibility of a letdown. And with as much talk as there has been about bowl games for Illinois, a loss now would greatly diminish the team’s chance to make it to early January.

ESPN.com’s bowl projections have Illinois going to the Capital One Bowl or the Rose Bowl depending on whose you look at. While the Capital One Bowl may not be out of the question (the Rose Bowl, realistically, is), it will take more consistent play from the Illini. That consistency will have to come against teams like Iowa, Ohio State and Michigan that have had (relative) stability in their play of late.

As those perennially good programs know, there is always a team that can be lurking in the midst of a great year that can upend an entire season’s work with one demoralizing loss. In a college football system in which one loss can take a team out of upper-echelon bowl consideration, letdowns are the difference between the Rose Bowl and the Papajohns.com Bowl.

A letdown game is hard to predict, too. Sometimes it comes early, like Michigan’s season opener this year, or late in a team’s season, like USC’s last year in week 12. The opponents, Appalachian State and UCLA, respectively, can vary greatly, as evident in these cases.

For Illinois, though, it may come in week 7 against an Iowa team that has given the Illini trouble, especially at Kinnick Stadium recently. The Hawkeyes have won seven of the last nine games, including the last four.

Regardless of the venue, Iowa is a tough team and cannot be overlooked, but Illinois seems to be nowhere near a place where a letdown can happen now.

Sure, Illinois is on the road, but this Hawkeye team is similar to the Indiana team the Illini dispatched three weeks ago in Bloomington, Ind. Iowa’s defense is most likely better than Indiana’s, but that didn’t stop Indiana from beating Iowa two weeks ago – at Kinnick.

Indiana and Illinois have very different offensive styles, but seeing that the teams Illinois beat – Penn State and Indiana – soundly beat Iowa certainly helps me to believe more that the Illini stand a great chance in this game. And if you have concerns that Iowa has been stopping the run well, do yourself a favor and see how many rushing yards it let up against Penn State last week.

Illinois’ stability is coming from its defense and running game. Those two alone will not get the Illini to the National Championship without a passing game, but until the aerial attack picks up, those two facets of the game can more than carry the team for now and keep it away from the “l-word.”

When asked about how they will stave off a letdown, the players and coaches will more or less say that they will just do more of the same. I thought it was just kind of a cop-out answer at first, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

When you have the ability to do the things that Illinois has done these past two weeks against Top-25 caliber teams, there really is no need to try to get too fancy. “Play harder,” it would seem, is the only possible answer.

Maybe it’s these past two victories, maybe I just believe too early. Who knows. Personally, I can find no room for a possible letdown out of this team this weekend.

And assuming all goes well, Illinois can finally focus on trying to win the Big Ten Conference because it will have met a goal that I doubt too many people thought would come this year: The Illini will be bowl-eligible.

Daniel Johnson is a junior in Communications. He can be reached at [email protected].