Explosive Illini Rise to the Top

The destruction of Wake Forest by Illinois in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge on Wednesday night could be perceived in one of two ways.One, as Illinois fans chanted in unison toward the end of the 91-73 thumping, the Demon Deacons, ranked No. 1 since the second week of the season, could have been overrated. Perhaps that’s true, but there’s a second, more definitive conclusion to be drawn from the game: Illinois is good.Make that very good. The schedule happened to place Wake Forest in the path of an orange-and-blue buzz saw this week, but it isn’t fair to judge the Deacons based on that game. There isn’t a team in the country that could win at Illinois, who will certainly ascend to the top of the polls next week.The Illini seem capable of hanging on to that spot for a while. Gonzaga, which defeated a strong Washington team on Wednesday, and Wake Forest can attest to that: Illinois played them both in a span of four days, and neither game was even remotely competitive.Coming into the season, the knock on the Illini was that they lacked size and strength in the post, but that perceived flaw apparently was overstated. The truth is, with most of the country’s top high-school post players bypassing college for the NBA, not many teams have size and strength in the post.That makes the undersized frontcourt duo of Roger Powell and James Augustine just fine by current standards. Powell might be the toughest player in the country to defend – Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser was more concerned about him than any other Illinois player – and Augustine is capable of dominating games, if only he would.What sets Illinois apart from the rest of the field – at least for now – is its guards. ESPN announcers debate endlessly about the nation’s best backcourt, usually pointing to an ACC school, but I’ll take the Illini threesome of Dee Brown, Deron Williams, and Luther Head any day. What makes this group so tough is its versatility. Brown or Williams can both handle the point. Either could just as easily move over to shooting guard. Both can score in a variety of ways, and Head might be a more consistent scorer than either of his backcourt mates. In short, no team has more perimeter firepower.The other thing to like about the Illini is their willingness to adapt to second-year coach Bruce Weber’s system. Weber’s motion offense was a departure from the offense run by former coach Bill Self, but Illinois now drives opponents to the point of exhaustion trying to keep up.Defensively, Illinois clamps the kind of smothering man-to-man on its opponents that would make Weber’s old boss, Purdue coach Gene Keady, proud. Few teams in the country are as efficient on both ends of the court.An ESPN announcer pointed out Wednesday night that Illinois is the only elite program in the country that hasn’t won a national championship. If the Illini can stay free of significant injuries and carry the intensity they showed against Wake Forest into March, that gap in the program’s 100-year resume can be filled.***Rule changes and scholarship reductions have slowly brought about parity in college basketball, and never has that been so evident as it has this season. Consider some of the upsets we’ve seen: South Carolina State takes out Penn State and Miami. Davidson wins at Missouri. Texas A&M – the one in Corpus Christi, not College Station – wins at Florida State. Winthrop wins on the road at Providence.True, none of those wins came against teams that will have a chance to win their respective power conferences, but if this keeps up, the so-called “guarantee” game will no longer have a double meaning. It used to be that when a Winthrop played at a Providence, Winthrop was guaranteed a big paycheck and Providence was guaranteed a win. The rash of upsets might make an athletic director at a power conference school think twice about scheduling a low-to mid-major team in the future.These upsets are good for college basketball. Lower-echelon teams have no choice but to play on the road, and schools like South Carolina State or Coppin State are forced to play brutal schedules just to make ends meet in their athletic departments. The fact that these teams are pulling the occasional upset gives the game an air of unpredictability that is usually reserved for March.It’s no secret how the lower-level D-I teams have become so competitive. It used to be that only the elite schools could recruit dominant big men; now, that pool of difference-makers is decreasing thanks to the NBA’s plundering. There has never been a shortage of good guards, and the upper-echelon schools can’t sign them all. If a mid-major school has a couple of three-point shooters on its roster, it is capable of winning, any time, anywhere.***The three-pointer isn’t the exclusive domain of the small schools. Occasionally, an upper-major team finds itself short of talent and has to resort to the perimeter game to survive.Such is the case at Auburn, where first-year coach Jeff Lebo is turning in the best coaching job in the country. Lebo inherited a mess from former coach Cliff Ellis, who left behind a team that finished last in the SEC’s Western Division last season. Things got even worse for Lebo after leading scorer Marco Killingsworth transferred to Indiana and the team’s only true big man, freshman Dwayne Curtis, left for Ole Miss.Left without a returning player taller than 6-foot-6, Lebo is essentially starting a five-guard lineup. The team has jumped out to a 5-0 start that includes wins at Temple and over Colorado State, a team with three seven-footers on its roster.Clearly, the Tigers are at a disadvantage in the rebounding department – Auburn is last in the SEC in rebounding margin at -4.6 per game. Their solution has been to not miss. The Tigers have cranked up an SEC-high 155 3-pointers (an average of 27.8 per game) and have hit 40% of them. It’s doubtful Lebo can work his magic deep into March, but his overachieving team has proven that a once bleak-looking season will be far more interesting than Tiger fans could have imagined.Mr. Dortch is the editor of the Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook.

Explosive Illini Rise to the Top

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