‘I thought it was a helluva idea when I was 19’: Bielema uses Tigerhawk tattoo as teaching tool

Like many teenagers in college, Illinois head coach Bret Bielema spontaneously decided to get a tattoo.

“As I say, I thought it was a helluva idea when I was 19,” Bielema said. “It was a rainy Saturday in Iowa City and there wasn’t a helluva lot going on, so somebody said, ‘Let’s get a tattoo.’”

Bielema played and coached at Iowa for a brief time. He then went on to lead the Wisconsin Badgers and now the Fighting Illini. Instead of getting of the tattoo of his rival removed, he decided to keep it as a reminder of his roots.

“I never met a successful person who wasn’t proud of where they came from,” Bielema said. “That was part of my playing time and my coaching time and a lot of who I am was developed when I was there.”

Which is a lesson he still preaches to his players to this day.

“He showed it to the team and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of cool,'” junior linebacker Gabe Jacas added. “I just keep it in the back of mind as motivation.”

“One year we were playing Iowa, and he said, ‘I’ve got an Iowa tattoo on my leg, but I still want to get after them,'” linebacker Seth Coleman added.

Bielema also got a funny story out of it when one his players thought that Bielema got inked up upon his arrival in Champaign.

“He’s like, ‘Coach, you already got an Illinois tattoo’ and I looked at him and I said, ‘Yep, that’s an Illinois tattoo.’ He didn’t know there was a Tigerhawk in the middle.” Bielema said.

“But I think about that all the time, it kind of has duality.”

It’ll be quite a while until Bret Bielema will play his alma mater — the next scheduled Iowa-Illinois game is 2026. The Hawkeyes do keep four trophy games, the most among anybody in the Big Ten.

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