Urbana - Highly touted Illinois freshman cornerback Marquez Beason will have season-ending knee surgery, head coach Lovie Smith announced on Monday.
Beason suffered the injury August 13 at practice .
"Marquez Beason will be having season-ending knee surgery in the future," Smith said in a press release. "It's unfortunate. He was one of the highlights early on. He's going to be a great player."
Beason was doing 1-on-1 drills against receivers in the endzone when he didn’t land right on a routine jump ball. He was then carted off the field and aided into the tent by his teammates and trainers. Beason appeared very emotional before entering the tent.
He emerged roughly 30 minutes later on crutches and in a knee brace and watched the remainder of practice.
“He didn’t finish practice. He went down with a knee injury,” Smith said initially after the injury. “He didn’t finish practice so that’s concerning. But we’ll kind of see how it goes.”
Beason was rated a four-star Rivals150 recruit coming out of Duncanville, Texas, and he held offers from several top programs such as Texas, Texas A&M, Ohio State, Oregon and Oklahoma. Instead, he chose to join a rebuilding Illinois program because he felt at home with school and wanted to help turn the program around.
To start his first training camp, Beason was practicing with the second team defense and was already flashing his potential at the position. He already rose up to become the primary back-up to the first string cornerbacks and received first team reps on a few occasions.
The Illini are not deep in the secondary, which may cause position changes in the near future. Starting free safety Tony Adams has played a majority of his career at corner, so he’s a common name that will pop up in those conversations. Illinois will also need players such as junior corner Nick Walker and senior Nolan Bernat to step up.
Freshman corners Devon Witherspoon Joseph Thompson are two other solutions to the depth issue, but they have yet to practice this camp as Witherspoon just arrived on campus and Thompson has been fighting off an injury.
“We need depth for it. You guys know the numbers. We don’t have a lot of depth,” Smith said. “Of course, with Marquez not being able to practice we’ll kind of keep searching. Our numbers are low there but sometimes you have to look at who plays corner. Athletic guys on our football team. Continue to need guys, will start to look elsewhere also as well on our roster.”
