None of that means Illinois arrives without its own question marks. Houser has plenty of college snaps, just zero of them in Bobby Hauck's new 3-3-5 defense or alongside these specific teammates, and season openers have a habit of exposing rust no matter how padded a resume looks. It's 84 degrees and clear at Gies Memorial Stadium for its first game of the year, which adds its own sliver of unknown to a night that's supposed to be a formality.
Hauck's arrival is the more interesting story on defense: he spent 19 years as a head coach, most recently going 151-43 at Montana, and Illinois brought him in specifically to install an aggressive, attacking scheme rather than promote from within. Whether that identity is visible in Week 1 against a UAB offense that returns its starting quarterback is one of the real things worth watching underneath the final score.
Burton's case for UAB isn't nothing, either. He beat a ranked opponent last season on the strength of a legitimate dual-threat game, and Mortensen -- the man Burton says was the reason he committed in the first place -- is now running the program full-time instead of on an interim tag. It's still a massive gap in overall roster talent, but Burton is a better answer at quarterback than a team replacing its entire defense usually gets to field.
Both programs are 0-0 walking into tonight, so there's no form to lean on beyond rosters and coaching bios -- which is exactly why the line has moved the way it has this week, with the market leaning harder into a lower-scoring outcome than it did when it first posted.