Not much Illini basketball over the rest of the month. A good time to eat some waffles, hit the weight room, and get some extra 3-point shooting work in. Maybe drill some late game inbounding plays.

This is when Underwood teams typically turn the corner. Fortunately it’s happening pre-Missouri lately rather than immediately after.

The W/L record isn’t amazing now but we have a top-10 defense and our biggest team weakness is 3-point shooting. I don’t have a handy stat to prove it but I know this team can shoot. That will get better.

Don’t look now but we’ll be betting favorites in 14 of our next 16 games even if we don’t improve.

You can blame the coach for every close loss where a team doesn’t execute at the end. Underwood blames himself some too. I’m pretty sure that “inbound the ball to the other team” wasn’t the play in the huddle, so there’s room for a new/young team to improve there too.

I agonized over this loss last night because I really felt like this was a winnable game. Every game this year felt that way. It’s because this Illini team is absolutely loaded and developing ahead of schedule.

Big picture is that if this team is a top 10 defense in December then the rest of the country better watch out come 2025, because you know the offense is coming soon.

Undie went with O and pivoted for Rilley, moving on from Fears the Illinois kid.

Mosser gladly took the Chicagoan Fears. Mosser knows the Chicago area well from his Final Four days at Loyola.

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/player/_/id/5144091/jeremiah-fears

We sure could use his 48% shooting and 17PPG.

Overall roster construction remains up and down. Oh well.