By FRED KRONER
Mike Cagley savors the “good ol days.”
Before his family moved to Mahomet in the late 1970s, he lived in Minier (west of Bloomington) and had a special reason for rising early.
“I’d be up at 6:15 to look at boxscores in The Pantagraph (newspaper),” Cagley said.
After the relocation, when he was in sixth grade, The News-Gazette became his daily newspaper of choice.
“I read the paper from front to back,” Cagley said, “but I had to start with the sports pages.”
One writer helped show Cagley what was possible with sports journalism.
“I was so appreciative of Loren Tate (former News-Gazette sports editor) to write columns that would create emotions and get you going,” Cagley said.
His family arrived in Mahomet at an opportune time for a young sports fan.
Lou Henson was in the midst of a Hall-of-Fame basketball coaching career with the Illini that featured Sweet Sixteen appearances three times between 1981 and 1985, followed in 1989 by the Flyin Illini’s Final Four berth.
In football, charismatic California transplant Mike White was soon hired as the head coach and proclaimed “The ‘80s belong to the Illini.”
His players backed up the boastful words, winning a Big Ten title in 1983 and earning the country’s fourth-ranked football team a trip to the Rose Bowl game on Jan. 2, 1984 (the last time the Illini would be in that game until 2008).
“With Lou and Mike, our generation was spoiled by what we saw,” said Cagley, who graduated from M-S in 1985. “It was a great time to become indoctrinated into the Illini experience.
“I think with Coach B (Bret Bielema) and Coach (Brad) Underwood, we appear to have two very good coaches at the very same time again.”
Cagley was even a fan before the Illini elevated their level of play to be competitive on a national stage.
“One of the first football games I saw, I sat in the end zone when you could get in for $2, and I watched a 0-0 tie (in November, 1978) between Illinois and Northwestern (teams that were 1-18-1 in their other games that fall),” he said.
Cagley eventually took his decades-long passion for Illini athletics to the next level in January, 2021 when he and four others – including another member of the M-S Class of ’85, Karl Welke – founded the web site, illiniguys.com.
“We cover non-revenue sports,” Cagley said, “but for football and basketball, we put on a full-court press.”
Cagley, whose day job is in customer service in Dallas, and Welke, a pediatric heart surgeon in North Carolina, have been best friends since they went to Seymour Grade School together during the 1978-79 school year.
The web site’s focus is on the Illini teams and the games – both previews and post-game analysis – as well as message boards for fans to interact, plus podcasts where interviews with current and former athletes and coaches can be found.
Cagley’s intent is to keep the mudslinging to a minimum.
Larry Smith 
Brad Sturdy 
Mike Cagley
“We do analysis of the games, but we don’t generally question the effort level or that the coach is ‘incompetent’,” co-founder Cagley said. “We assume people are trying to win.
“We expect our fans to express their frustrations, but we try to keep more to the games and keep the personal out of it.”
That mantra is part of what separates illiniguys.com from many competitors.
“A lot of sites are just angry banter,” Cagley said.
Cagley and Welke have assembled an all-star cast of contributors, who are respected nationally in the sports journalism field.
“One thing we need are reporters with credibility and respect with fans, the university and the coaching staff,” Cagley said.
Staffers include Springfield-area resident Brad Sturdy, who has more than 20 years’ experience covering UI basketball, Mattoon native Larry Smith, a news anchor in Lexington, Ky., whose background includes coverage of multiple Olympics, Super Bowls and NCAA Final Fours as well as Kedric Prince, a newspaper journalist based in Moline who coordinates the site’s recruiting coverage.
Cagley, a former AAU coach, brings a viewpoint relatable to many UI supporters. Sturdy and Smith were also involved from the time the idea was first floated by Cagley around Labor Day, 2020.
“I’m an Illini super-fan and I bring back the voice of the common man who follows the Illini,” Cagley said. “Sometimes you have a dream and it’s only in the back of your mind.
“I’m not sure what hit me to take it from ‘maybe I should’ to ‘I’m going to do it and now is the time to do it.’”
If there was any doubt whether the venture would be successful, then those were alleviated quickly.
“We shut down two levels of servers and had to get a much larger server than we anticipated,” Cagley said. “We were not able to handle the sheer volume that the Illini fan base demands.
“Now we’re up to a massive server size. We’re happy with our growth. We more than doubled our annual plan in the first six months, and football season is not even here yet.”
The numbers are truly staggering. The site has had visitors from 71 different countries as well as visitors from nearly 2,500 different United States cities.
“We feel very fortunate to have a good base of supporters,” Cagley said. “That goes to the credibility of Brad Sturdy, Larry Smith and now (recent addition) Matt Stevens (part of the UI football beat), who can take the mundane and turn it into an informative and interesting article for the reader.”
Cagley has been collecting and storing sports knowledge in his brain for decades.
“I was a true sportsaholic at a very young age,” Cagley said. “I read the newspaper for the stats, the stories on the games and the standings.
“When I was a kid, I could tell you the lineups of the (Dallas) Cowboys with no problem. I knew most of the major league starters.
“As I’ve aged, I focus mostly on the Illini and the Cowboys.”
A former all-conference football player for the Bulldogs – back when M-S competed in the Okaw Valley – Cagley was a two-time letterman in football and basketball for the Bulldogs. Welke was a two-sport letterman in cross-country and track and field.
Cagley’s high school coaches were influential in terms of the knowledge they were imparting.
“That was the era when coaches taught the game really well,” Cagley said. “We had Frank Dutton in football and Del Ryan in basketball.
“Ryan was quite radical in the way he coached. When the vast majority of the (area) teams practiced one defense, we played four or five defenses and disguised them to get teams playing hesitantly.”
Cagley enjoys all aspects of the illiniguys.com operations, but has developed a special fondness for one area in particular.
“The podcasts,” he said. “I’m very proud of our podcasts, how we interact and the information we get out there. It might be talking with David Williams (ex-Illini footballer) talking about how he goes through dealing with sons being great athletes, or whatever.
“I couldn’t have anticipated how enjoyable that is.”
As illiniguys.com continues to grow and expand, Cagley and cohorts emphasize more than regurgitating the scores and stats. He and his staffers seek to provide insight and perspective.
“With all the people we have contributing, we get good points of view,” he said, “and we’re trying to bring in more voices.
“We talk about what’s going on in practices and what’s going on in recruiting.”
The growing list of contributors includes another M-S graduate, Patrick Quinn (Class of ’98), who is involved with podcasts, Kirkland Chappell (UI football coverage), Steve Sturm (evaluations of football recruits) and Cagley’s 24-year-old son, Connor (who handles game previews).
Helping the administrators lure quality journalists is the continued downsizing taking place among many daily newspaper and monthly or weekly magazine staffs.
Regardless of whether new content has been added recently by a staffer, Cagley said, “there is always something new on there because of the interaction with the subscribers (on message boards).”
While the stories are fact-based, the message boards allow fans the opportunity to speculate and offer wistful views.
“People talk about the rumor mill,” Cagley said. “It maybe can’t be 100 percent verified, but we can get some insight.”
Cagley and Smith first met more than a decade ago through their mutual postings on message boards.
“We were just two guys who were posting our opinions,” Cagley said.
Though their business venture is still in its infancy, the reputation and brand of illiniguys is growing rapidly.
“We’re getting on radio stations to be the Illini experts,” Cagley said. “When something happens, they call us and we explain what is going on.
“We get our name out there and better serve their listeners.”
In the works, Cagley said, is some non-sports-related copy.
“We would like to add features about Champaign-Urbana so alumni who are far away can keep up with the changes and see how Champaign-Urbana is evolving,” Cagley said.
The illiniguys.com site went live on Jan. 12, 2021, but they were actually up and running prior to that date.
“We wrote our stories in real time as they happened from the beginning of the 2020-21 basketball season,” said Cagley, a business and marketing major at Southern Illinois University.
Smith authored the story on the men’s basketball season-opener on Nov. 25, 2020. A portion of that story can be viewed here: : Illini put record-setting beatdown on Aggies in season-opening win – IlliniGuys.com.
The first story posted when the site went live was about a football commitment, written by Sturm. A portion of that story can be viewed here: Football Recruiting – Spotlight on Max Rosenthal – IlliniGuys.com.
The first podcast was an introduction to the site, which Cagley said, “is a throwback to a true Marvel comic book tradition, an origin story. It can be heard here: I on the Illini with the Illini Guys – Origin of the Illini Guys – S1, Ep1 – IlliniGuys.com.
A one-year subscription to illiniguys.com is $99. The monthly charge is $10.99. Cagley said anyone interested can check the site out for seven days before payment is required.
Want to know more about Cagley and the illiniguys site? Listen to Fred Kroner’s podcast with Cagley, which will be posted at Mahomet Daily on Friday, July 9.
