Posted by ESPN.com's Adam Rittenberg

Ron Zook has a future at Illinois beyond this season, at least according to his boss. And for that, Zook is grateful.

"That's not what I'm concerned about, I'm concerned about these players," Zook said. "Obviously, it was nice for [athletic director Ron] Guenther to do that. You hate to put people in that type of situation where they've got to stick up for you, but it goes to show you coach Guenther is very, very close to what's going on here. He sees what's going on here. He's scratching his head just like the rest of us."

Zook hasn't been able to pinpoint how an Illinois team returning a decent amount of veteran players sits at 1-6 and in last place in the Big Ten. The Illini rank last in the league in 13 statistical categories, including scoring offense, scoring defense, pass offense and total defense.

The hardest part is neither he nor his players saw any of this coming.

"I was talking to one of our fifth-year guys this morning," Zook said. "He talked to me and said, 'What the heck? No one saw this thing coming.' He came out of Camp Rantoul and he said it was the best camp, by far, we'd ever had. Everybody was fresher. We kind of stumbled out of the blocks there and got a couple of guys hurt early in the Missouri game and then played two pretty good teams (Ohio State and Penn State) and probably our confidence began to shake a little bit.

"I wish you could say it was injuries, I wish you could put it on one player, but as I've told our football team, 'We've all got a piece of this, coaches included, and me with the most. And we're the only ones that can fix it.'"