The sting of Illinois basketball falling to an unranked Missouri Tigers program is not going away.
Illinois was coming off a top 10 win over Duke just days earlier. Some would say this was set up to be a letdown game, and that is exactly what happened. The Illini came out and didn’t have the same juice they had against the Blue Devils.
Even with that said, Illinois still almost pull off the victory. Sadly, the Illini couldn’t win the game as the Tigers would squeak out the 81-78 win. There were some things I noticed in the game and some things that could be improved moving forward.
Here are four observations from the Illini loss to Missouri.
1. We are still a team that is learning
No matter how much experience we have on the team, the Illini are clearly still learning how to win on a consistent basis.
Even during the 2019-20 campaign, the Illinois basketball team didn’t have massive streaks of winning. The biggest winning streak was seven games, and that was in the middle of the Big Ten season. Beyond that, we only won four games in a row two different times.
The Illini are still learning how to win. On top of still learning how to win, they are also learning how to win with expectations.
Last season, Illinois didn’t have expectations of winning a national title. They were the Cinderella story and the darlings of the college basketball world. The Illini didn’t have anything to lose. But this year is totally different. They had the fifth-best odds to win the national title. That is a lot of pressure.
So, while Illinois has one of the best, most experienced, lineups I have seen in years, they are still learning how to win with so much pressure. We saw a team last night that completely changed the way they played for no reason other than pressure. They got tight and it showed.
This will change as time moves on. Brad Underwood sees what happened and will change it in practice and moving forward. We have a smart team that will adjust to what happened last night quickly.