The name? You've probably seen it before.

No, not the first. The last one. The one with the seemingly indisputable NFL ties.

Sure, Luke Butkus knows you've heard the name, too. He hasn't lived in a shell. He hears it all the time, too.

He acknowledges it all, a tightly forced smile coupled with a squint, as one would appear when staring at the sun.

Butkus is the nephew of former Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, whom the Illinois Football Media Guide dubiously dubbed "the greatest linebacker in football history."

"When you're talking linebacker, you're watching films of Butkus," said Luke's teammate, Jerry Schumacher.

A few New York Giants fans might scoff, instead parading their own hero, Lawrence Taylor. (At least one article, on ESPN.com, called Taylor "a Butkus with wheels.")

Dick Butkus was named as the head coach of the Chicago-based XFL team (a league jointly owned by the World Wrestling Federation and NBC) before being promoted to Director of Football Competition — nearly four months prior to the inaugural season.

He is a University of Illinois alumnus. Taylor, on the other hand, attended North Carolina.

Luke Butkus doesn't care. He plays center. To compare him to his uncle, he says, is fine for the papers, but poor logically.

"When I first got here, that's all I got was questions about him," Luke said. "There's still comparisons, but I still play a different style of ball."

Last season, he was responsible for snapping the ball on nearly each play of each game to quarterback Kurt Kittner. It was his first year starting, after a year of coming in for nine games as a backup.

He held four teams sackless, and helped the Fighting Illini rush for more than 2,000 yards and pass for nearly 3,000.

This year, six games in and the seventh against Penn State tomorrow, the Illini have both rushed and passed for more than 1,000 yards — 1,112 rushing and 1,238 passing. With five games remaining, including tomorrow's, those numbers don't quite parallel last season's.

Then again, the offense turned out to be the highest-scoring squad in school history.

Perhaps the defenses were substantially weaker last year. And with teams such as Indiana and Iowa, each giving up more than 30 points per game, a concise argument could be drawn in that direction.

Is the game still won in the trenches?

Luke acknowledges the game has changed, but he won't say it's gotten tougher.

"I don't know about tougher," Butkus said. "Today I think there are more athletes in the game, and that makes it harder for us.

"As far as toughness, they didn't have the facilities we have," he added. "The game's just evolved."

One might wonder how he would have fared against his father, or L.T., for that matter.