Illinois Basketball: Illini schedule one of the toughest in a decade

Slowly but surely, the Illinois basketball season is being pieced together to form one solid schedule.

With only six games on the schedule so far and a Big Ten slate to be released in the coming weeks, the Illini are looking at a tough road ahead.

The season tips off with a round-robin style tournament in Champaign where Illinois will face off against North Carolina A&T, Wright State and Ohio in a span of three days from November 25-27. This style of competition makes sense considering all teams get to play games and they are in a somewhat controlled environment.

But, from there, the other three games currently on the Illinois schedule consist of No. 2 Baylor in the Jimmy V Classic, No. 9 Duke in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge and Missouri in the Braggin’ Rights game, which is on the road this year at Missouri.

The non-conference is looking mighty tough for the Fighting Illini, but the conference schedule won’t get easier. While the schedule isn’t quite mapped out, we know that Illinois will play every team at least once.

So, that means the Illini will go up against No. 5 Iowa, No. 7 Wisconsin, No. 13 Michigan State, No. 23 Ohio State, No. 24 Rutgers and No. 25 Michigan this season. Couple those six conference games with the two top 10 teams we play in the non-conference. That is an extremely tough schedule.

How does the 2020-21 schedule compare to the past 10 years?

Illinois is slated to, at least, play four top 10 teams and a total of eight top 25 teams. Most likely, we will play a couple of ranked teams twice, so we can project that Illinois will play four top 10 teams and 10 top 25 teams. I think that is fair to say.

As far as top 10 teams go, Illinois has only played more top 10 teams during the 2012-13 campaign over the past decade. That year, the Illini made the NCAA tournament after playing six top 10 games.

It will be interesting to see how many top 25 games Illinois ends up with this season. The Illini average 7.5 top 25 games per season in the last 10 years. So, already, the 2021-22 campaign is over that mark.

If Illinois does end up playing a couple of ranked teams twice and hit 10 top 25 programs for this season, that would be a tie for the most ranked opponents in a single-season over the past decade. In 2012-13 and 2013-14, the Illini also played 10 ranked teams.

On a side note, top 25 games tend to not bode well for the Illini. There have been three coaches for Illinois in the last decade and none of them have had better than at 25-percent winning percentage against ranked opponents. Bruce Weber won 25-percent of his ranked games, John Groce won 24-percent of his ranked games and Brad Underwood has won 22-percent of his ranked games.

There is some nuance to the success rating against ranked opponents, though, but I digress.

So, if you look at the numbers, Illinois is already facing one of the toughest schedules over the past 10 years. Depending on how the conference slate shakes out, we could be looking at the toughest stretch of games we have seen in a long time.