And they drew a tough 2nd round opponent who was vastly underseeded based on advanced metrics. Loyola defense was legit and was able to stymied Illinois from doing what they want to do on offense.
Will be a huge bummer if Curbelo leaves. Heās going to be super fun and even though that Illinois team will probably max out at, like, 20th? They should still play fast and make a lot of threes. The kind of team I want to see more of in the B1G.
Also I think Underwood doesnāt get enough credit. His resume is not just getting punked by Porter Moser. Dude hired 2 assistants worth $1M a year and completely flipped his style of play to suit his players which in turn won him a B1G title. Pretty clear heās got some idea of what heās doing.
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You could do a lot worse than Underwood. This yearās exodus has to be balanced against last yearās retention of the two stars. I donāt see a hot seat there, though I also donāt necessarily see program building either.
That last part of your last sentence is doing a lot of work there. He has never been at a place long enough to really build a program.
That could have been said about Beilein once upon a time. Iād feel pretty good about Underwood if he made the tournament this coming year if Iām an Illini fan. But his recruiting class for 2022 is odd, two very underrated commits already. Hard to totally evaluate considering COVID, still a bit strange. Theoretically Curbelo should be a guy thatās around for a while.
Looking at it, itās hard to compare since Beilein was always an HC (hey did you guys know that Beilein has never been an assisstant? 
). But Beilein had multiple stays of 5+ years in which bad teams became good ones that got 20 wins and tourney bids, etc. Underwood had stints that long as an assistant but since getting his first HC job heās bounced around too fast to have built anything.
Eh, Iāve always thought the regular season banner means more, but a Big Ten Tournament banner is a real banner. The fake one is their regular season conf championship.
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Pretty clear it takes a certain type to play and coach for underwood. Tons of turnover under him.
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Plus they won their first round game by like 30 points. They looked perfectly fine physically then.
Illinois had some terrible clunkers and the Adam Miller transfer isnāt great, but everything else that has happened this off season seems totally reasonable. Losing players to the NBA is never bad and losing assistants to Kentucky is not exactly the same as losing an assistant to Ohio (any school in Ohio), especially when those assistants are already Kentucky people.
As expected.
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Grady, Fredrick and Tshiebwe is a really interesting re-load for Cal. Could see them being very good
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This will be such a strange UK team relative to what Cal has established. They have a top 10 F coming in, plus Bryce Hopkins. Then 4 upperclassman transfers. And a couple of low ranked recruits relative to normal UK teams that are now older.
They desperately need a PG though.
also
there are 9 words in this tweet and 3 of them are hashtags. UK somehow took #TheBrotherhood and made it dumber with La Familia. This is the University of Kentucky. Using Spanish wordsā¦
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Apparently theyāve been using it for a long time
they are desperately hoping for Marcus Carr
they can have Curbelo. that would be funnier. Carr would make them too good.
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Curbelo, Grady, Fredrick, Tshiebwe, 5-star C whose name I canāt remember would probably win the SEC, right?
Looks like Mintz is returning he can certainly play PG, Keion Brooks is coming back it looks like and Isaiah Jackson has left the door open on returning.
Mintz just declared the other day. He hasnāt signed an agent but itās certainly in the air in what heāll do
Probably them or Alabama. If Primo and Shackelford come back, I might put Bama ahead of them. Jahvon Quinerly, Jaden Shackelford, Josh Primo, Keon Ellis, JD Davison and Nimari Burnett is a heck of a slate of backcourt players. Gurley transferred in the front court. Bediako is coming in.
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