Casey Washington’s Career Year for Illinois Football
Illinois Football’s season came to an unfortunate end this past weekend. After plenty of offseason buzz and expectation, Illinois Football came out of the gates struggling. They appeared to find their way through some last-minute heroics, however, fell short at home vs Northwestern. Illinois Football will lose a lot of their top-end talent once again. Johnny Newton, Keith Randolph, Isaiah Adams, and more are definitely moving on to the next chapter in their lives. Players like Isaiah Williams and Seth Coleman will have big decisions to make. Do they want to go the route of what Newton and Randolph chose to do for one more year?
Additionally, Illinois will lose some key names to graduation. A player of note is Casey Washington. Washington may not have been the star player like Chase Brown or Isaiah Williams, however, he had a darn good career at Illinois and ended up with a Career year for Illinois Football.
4th and Casey?
Casey Washington has had quite an interesting career. He had the game-winning touchdown in the 9OT game against Penn State. This was a couple of months after he transferred to Wake Forest and decided to come back to Illinois. He then had a rather quiet 2022-2023 season behind Isaiah Williams, Pat Bryant, and Brian Hightower. To start off this year, Casey saved Illinois Football on the final drive at home vs Toledo. Luke Altmyer had defensive linemen directly in his face as he delivered a spot-on ball to Washington. This allowed the Illini to grab a new set of downs and also allowed them to establish field goal range.
Afterward, Washington came up huge in the road win against Maryland. Maryland had just tied the game, and Illinois desperately needed a score. Again, Casey grabbed a big-time contested jump ball to help Illinois get into field goal position.
A Final Game to Go out on.
Casey Washington did everything in his power to help Illinois win. Despite the amount of times Illinois seemed done for, fans would look up and see Casey Washington making a play. Washington ended the game with 9 catches for 218 yards and 3 touchdowns. Washington had not even had a receiving touchdown before the Indiana game on November 11th. Overall, Casey’s career year looked like this: 49 catches for 670 yards and 4 touchdowns.
That is one heck of a way to go out on, and a heck of a year to close out a college career. Cheers to Casey Washington.
More must-reads: