Illinois basketball, elite again? Brad Underwood says ceiling is even higher in 2024-25

That sure was quite a breakthrough Illinois’ men’s basketball program made last March. A Big Ten tournament championship. An NCAA run to the Elite Eight. An irrepressible scorer in Terrence Shannon Jr. binging on buckets like nobody’s business. What fun. What a thrill ride.

Yeah, well, get over it. It’s gone, buried, yesterday’s news.

The Illini are back, and they are utterly unrecognizable.

Let’s start with the team’s returnees for the upcoming season. It won’t take long. We have Ty Rodgers, who was fifth last season in scoring, and Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn, who had a handful of decent moments coming from deep off the bench. That’s it, folks. Were you expecting more?

There are few teams in the country that can compare — even in this Wild West time in college sports — to the Illini’s level of turnover. When coach Brad Underwood lamented six-plus months ago that he was already noodling around in the transfer portal while the Illini were still playing games, he wasn’t kidding. Pretty much everyone who’s anyone on his next team will be a newcomer; in all, a blend of transfers and freshmen who might come together but, then again, might not.

The names are promising enough. There are five transfers, most notably, at least for now, 6-9 shooter Ben Humrichous from Evansville and 6-2 playmaker Kylan Boswell, a Champaign native who has come home from Arizona. The freshmen include potential gems in 6-8 Canadian Will Riley — Underwood’s highest-rated recruit — as well as 6-6 Lithuanian Kasparas Jakucionis and 6-9 Morez Johnson (Thorton).

At least 10 players are being projected by media and fans into a rotation that doesn’t exist yet, and that’s a whole lot. Much has changed in the college game, and players are being catered to more than ever, but there’s still only one ball.

An all-new roster with all-new dynamics and an all-new set of unforeseeable challenges. What could go wrong?

“I like where we’re at,” Underwood insisted.

The conference media must concur, because Illinois was picked for fourth place out of 18 teams in a 33-voter independent poll conducted jointly by The Columbus Dispatch and The Indianapolis Star. Purdue was the favorite, followed by Indiana, UCLA and the Illini. That’s some serious respect for what recent Illini teams have done and for Underwood, who has become one of the league’s heavy hitters.

“We have a higher ceiling [than last year], for sure,” Underwood said.

That’s a real mouthful considering Shannon, Marcus Domask and Coleman Hawkins aren’t around anymore to run Underwood’s stuff. Is it really possible the players who spilled through the Champaign turnstiles from all over the map all offseason could add up to even more than a 29-win group that didn’t stop until it ran into unbeatable UConn, the eventual national champ?

“I always want to be picked toward the top,” Underwood said. “I always want to be in big games. We’re trying to win a national championship.

“The Elite Eight was a great run. It was great for the players to get to experience that. But that’s not why I’m here. We want to play two more games, and we’re going to keep the pedal to the metal and the foot on the gas and whatever other cliché you want to use until we get there.”

And then there’s Northwestern

Chris Collins’ Wildcats have gone to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments. Fluke success? Oh, please. They tied for second place in the Big Ten in 2022-23 and tied for third in 2023-24. Just ask Purdue and Zach Edey how tough these guys have been.

Enter the aforementioned media poll and, oh, boy, it’s the same old disregard when it comes to the little purple engine from Evanston. The school’s career scoring leader, Boo Buie, has moved on, but Collins’ team has as much experience coming back as anybody. Still, the Wildcats were pegged for 16th place. According to the Big Ten’s new rules, only 15 teams will participate in the conference tournament.

If you’re 16th, you’re nobody.

“We don’t really care how we’re viewed,” Collins said. “We believe in who we are.”

Collins told his players this week, “That’s what people think of you.”

Apparently, it’s what league media think of him, too. Remember that when the games come.

Still Purdue’s world?

Edey, a two-time national player of the year — and the Big Ten’s most dominant player in a generation — is in the NBA. Isn’t it a little much that 20 of 33 voters had the Boilermakers at the tops of their ballots?

Fine. I was one of the voters and had them first, too (as well as Illinois at No. 4 and Northwestern at No. 14).

It’s not very imaginative of us. Then again, no one in the Big Ten is more consistent than Boilers coach Matt Painter, who’s coming off his first trip to the national final and has the league’s preseason player of the year in point guard Braden Smith.

“Winning softens you,” Painter said. “Can we keep that edge?”

He added about the 7-4 Edey, “He didn’t come to our team the way he was at the end. I had to make those guys throw him the basketball, and some days he caught it and some days he didn’t. But we had to grow with him.”

We’ll soon find out if they can do so without him.