We’ve seen the forecast, and here’s what it says about the 2019-20 Illinois basketball team:
The NCAA Tournament drought is over, baby. A thing of the past. Yesterday’s news. So long, sucker. Poof! Gone.
Maybe.
A preseason poll, conducted in tandem by The Columbus Dispatch and The Athletic, of 28 Big Ten beat writers — two per school — landed Illinois at seventh in the league, behind sixth-place Wisconsin by the narrowest of margins.
An upper-half finish by the Illini? That hasn’t happened since the 2010-11 season, Bruce Weber’s next-to-last at the helm.
A top-seven finish would at least give the NCAA selection committee something to talk about. In three of the six years since Illinois’ last appeared in the Big Dance — in Weber’s successor John Groce’s first season — precisely seven Big Ten teams received bids. In 2014, the number was six. In 2018, it was only four. In 2019, though, it was eight.
So, again: a definite maybe.
But it’s not wrong to crank up those expectations, and it’s not too early to turn up the heat on third-year Illini coach Brad Underwood. His team doesn’t have to settle for playing its way onto the tournament bubble.
The Illini have all the necessary ingredients to break through this season, starting with the explosively talented backcourt tandem of Ayo Dosunmu and Trent Frazier. They have one of the conference’s most dynamic big men in Giorgi Bezhanishvili and their most promising true center since at least a few coaches ago in freshman Kofi Cockburn.
And this is easily the deepest Illini team since the Weber years.
Why dance around it? Either Illinois reacquaints itself with March Madness or Underwood, in this third year, starts to look like a bust.
His first two Illini teams were a combined 11-27 in league play. He sees a lot more “swagger” this time around.
“I think there’s a different feel about us, just from the experience standpoint,” he said Wednesday at Big Ten media day in Rosemont. “I don’t think there’s that giddiness of the unexpected. I think we know now.”
Underwood often blows smoke about Illinois being an “elite” program. There are many Illini supporters who similarly live in the past in this regard. News flash, people: Illinois basketball has been an irrelevant dud for a long, painful stretch.
But this is the season when that can — should — end.
“Nothing would make me happier than — not just for our players, but for our fans — to get back and get in the tournament, be able to make a great run and continue to lay the foundation for what should be an every-year experience for us,” Underwood said.
Sounds like a plan.
JUST SAYIN’
The Big Ten tournament is over five months away, but Michigan State might as well start cutting down the nets at Indianapolis’ Bankers Life Fieldhouse right now.
No, not really.
But if the media are right, the Spartans will steamroll the rest of the league en route to the top of the standings. They received 27 of 28 first-place votes and will be the consensus No. 1 team in the country. Tom Izzo has rarely, if ever, been in better position.
The rest of the league? A crap shoot, though Ohio State looks particularly ready to rumble to me.
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• And then there’s Northwestern. For those who have blinked since the Wildcats broke through to the NCAA Tournament in 2017, the program now finds itself back at the all-too-familiar crossroads of fruitlessness and invisibility.
The Wildcats are 14th — dead last, which is where they finished last season — in the same Big Ten poll.
No more Vic Law and Dererk Pardon. Miller Kopp and Pete Nance are the names to know now. Hopefully, they’ve got a few good upsets in them.
It’s not the finest hour for coach Chris Collins, entering Year 7 in Evanston. His teams have lost 28 of 38 league games since the NCAA trip.
“As I look in my locker room now, it’s a whole new group,” Collins said. “For me, that’s very exciting.”
At least somebody’s excited.
• Bears and Raiders.
Pigskin and grub.
I don’t know what kind of food will be available Sunday at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but I want to believe there’ll be vendors in the stands yelling, “Bangers and mash here!”
It would make for messy eating, but the name just screams football — our football.
Better pack a bib just in case.
• Khalil Mack sacks vs.Eddy Pineiro field goals.
Which ex-Raider has more Sunday?
Discuss.
• Bears 23, Raiders 16. And print it.
• The first day of the biggest season of Jeremy Colliton’s life starts Friday.
If he coaches the Blackhawks back to the playoffs, he’s a young genius. If the Hawks fail to qualify for the third year in a row, he’s in over his head.
Fair or not — and it’s not, considering this is his first full season — we’re headed for one or the other.
