CHICAGO – Lovie Smith spent much of his time with Big Ten media members on Monday lamenting the current state of the Illinois football facilities, and excitedly looking to the future when the infrastructure gets upgraded.

When Smith agreed to become Illini football coach in March 2016, he received a promise from new athletics director Josh Whitman that he’d get to work quickly on modernizing the facilities. And Whitman has followed through.

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Illinois announced last week that a $79.2 million upgrade is in the works, with a 107,650 square foot Illinois Football Performance Center to be constructed next to the Irwin Indoor Practice Facility and adjacent to Memorial Stadium. Whitman estimated on Monday that ground will be broken in January or February of 2018 and the project will be completed before the 2019 season. Phase two of the renovation, which does not yet have a timeframe, will include expansions on the stadium’s south and east sides.

“Right now, we don’t have players that are just coming to our place based on facilities, but we feel like we’re evening up that playing field an awful lot,” Smith said. “And what we’re talking about, meeting rooms, the latest and greatest in technology, new weight facility, you know, all of these things … when you have the latest and the greatest, that has to be a positive.”

With a year under his belt on the field and in recruiting, Smith has a better gauge of what he’s up against in an extremely competitive Big Ten. “Our facilities, we just felt like we were behind most of the other teams in the Big Ten and college football in general,” Smith said. “So having plans and a start date for our new facility should put us on par with other football teams, other football programs.”

Whitman and colleagues traveled around the country to several schools, seeing what the landscape looked like. At Clemson he learned that the Tigers have upgraded their football facilities three times in the last 30 years, compared to once in 40 years at Illinois.

“My first car was in 1985, Nissan Stanza I believe, and that’s kind of what we’re driving right now with our facilities,” Whitman said. “So we’re going to try and take a significant upgrade and we think it will make a big difference for our program. We were on par with everyone when I played but people have picked up the pace here in the last 20 years. We’ve done as much as we can. It’s a 1985 building that’s built for a 1985 football program. We’ve retrofitted that thing as much as we can and it just doesn’t work anymore. So we’re going to start over and it will be great for the program.”

Whitman said the decision to go with a stand-alone building, as opposing to something attached to Memorial Stadium, was made to allow for more flexibility to do exactly what they want. He added that Illini strength coaches are excited about the new facility’s direct access from the weight room to the practice field.

“It’s going to be an Illinois facility,” Whitman said. “I think this is going to be a building that strongly identifies with our campus, our culture, our state. That’s most important to me.”