Champaign, Illinois — On another Monday night, Brad Underwood hit Papa Dell’s Pizza Factory. Waiting for him is a glass of ice water, a headset, and here he is a table of about ten locals for Coach’s weekly radio show in Illinois.The proceedings are applause and rivalry. The game starts at 7:00 pm. Annual Braggin’ Rights game against Missouri is 3 days later. And one of the key things Underwood reveals early on is him explaining to his team exactly what his Braggin’ Rights are.
Part of his team, anyway. Earlier, two freshmen asked Underwood to analyze the significance of 42 his preseason series. When identifying players to meet with the media to preview the game, Underwood realized that only active and healthy Illini had no experience with the game. Assistant his coach Chester Frazier was able to piss the team off, remembering his Braggin’ Rights fight for four years. Any more? Forget the growing hostility over time. Due to the ephemeral nature of the sport, something so entrenched looked like an antique in a novelty shop.
“It’s a different world,” Underwood, 59, finally told the audience, striving for something sustainable in the face of constant change and what else for coaches in the midst of redefinition. Tell me what’s new.
In short, Illinois is a completely different place than it was a year ago. it doesn’t look the same. It doesn’t play the same. The results are similar – Illini ranks his 16th and in the top 10 he has two wins – but the whole maneuver works on a different calculus.
Underwood and his staff welcomed their sixth year in Champaign by nearly completely undoing and redoing the system in a matter of months. Teams with a lot of postups rarely post up anymore. Coaches who never switched on screens now switch on screens all the time. Illinois is a symbol of the agile flexibility needed to survive in an era of ever-changing rosters, and a path to avoiding yearly reinvention to build identity in modern college hoops. “The key was long-term sustainability,” says Underwood. “What I mean is, ‘OK, let’s find a way to play that can be recruited’.” Gone. We haven’t found it again. Now let’s figure out how to play and what it looks like.it’s obvious NBA We play, but it’s also how I think you can recruit. ”
Not always this way. Scan those national polls and you’ll find a few programs with hard-boiled identities, regardless of roster composition. Alabama Play fast and shoot 3 seconds north with a 40%+ chance. Virginia Raise the ball and defend. and so on. It doesn’t matter who comes in or out. A plan is a plan. But when the 7-foot, 285-pound center with the gravitational pull of the event’s horizon left town, it was supposed to be this way for Illinois this time. By the time it replenished, only 18 shows had less duration per season than Illinois.
However, the new Illinois has taken years to create as well. Even before signing the aforementioned monolith, Kofi Cockburn, Underwood knew he would never find another specimen like that again. , Underwood said it was only a matter of time before his program’s system revolved around the specific skill set of the 7-footer, with Cockburn leaving and Illinois We have to come up with new ways of operating. Looking to his post-Kofi existence has resulted in adopting bigger wings such as his current sophomore RJ Melendez When Luke Good, both are multi-position 6-7 pieces.Underwood got his first head coaching job at his college in Dodge’s City (Kansas) community in 1988, with Stephen F. Austin. Oklahoma Before I took a job in Illinois in 2017, I watched tapes of the Boston Celtics, Golden State Warriors and Euroleague. But it all boiled down to more or less ordering the appliance, staring at the renders, and then the demo crew ripping the place to studs to start the real work.
After a second-round loss to Houston in the NCAA Tournament in March, a full renovation began, but this only strengthened Underwood’s plans. I could shoot,” he says. “They were sore necks.” Within days, at standard end-of-season meetings, the returning players learned that the summer would be their version of basic training. About driving, cutting and spraying the ball, ideally at a pace that could push 80+ possessions per game.
The core philosophy remains the same. Put the ball in the paint and go from there. The closer you are to the basket, the more chances you have to score. Old school, as Underwood puts it. Everyone just follows new directions to the same place.
During the 2021-22 season, 14.1% of Illinois’ offensive possessions ended in postups. 15th highest in the nation according to Synergy Sports, which he had a game plan to expire on March 20. Melendez says. “And we are doing it now.”
(Michael Hickey/Getty Images)
While it was important to pluck talented, experienced and productive wings from the transfer portal, Terrence Shannon Jr. (current Illinois top scorer) and Matthew Mayer (averaging 18.7 points over his last three games) had more effect than cause. I’ll say I haven’t even seen a second. Based on Underwood’s pitch, it was totally irrelevant. Mayer said:
The challenge, of course, is to successfully install the system in a few months and more than half the roster is new. Some holdovers had reference points. The offense morphed into something of his 2022-23 when Cockburn got hurt or fouled him out of trouble and playing in the post was no longer a priority. But they were vestiges of identity. It took building from scratch to do it as a principle rather than the exception.
How to throw a shake pass. Learn what Go Screen and Blur Screen are and how to use them. How to attack the closeout. no one skipped. Coleman Hawkins Having racked up almost 900 minutes of floor time in his first two seasons, the junior-to-be has soaked up lessons on dribbling handoffs, how to perform dribbling handoffs, and reading defenders in response. I noticed. Such.
He learned it all as a freshman. It was therapeutic and boring in a way. But the old became new again. “It’s basic Day 1 stuff,” Hawkins says. “We’re literally just working on our skills, not like my sophomore year where everyone already knew that. This was getting to the basics of our offensive principles.”
A change of mindset was also necessary. Illinois mostly put their players on offense and rarely cut to the paint because Cockburn was there. “So it didn’t make sense,” says Underwood. Cuts are emphasized now. Now Illini had to relearn not only physical skills, but also behavior. See the back of the defender’s head? Now cut the rim. “We don’t have that threat, so now we need to work to find people who are open,” he says. “It’s a little harder, but it makes the defense move more. They’re going to make mistakes at some point.”
In some respects, Illinois’ roster turnover was favorable. Anyway, new students learn everything for the first time.Mayer played on nearly the same system Baylor, to ease his assimilation. Overall buy-in, on the other hand, is what we expect from players given the freedom to read and react. Hawkins has been known to hunt down Warriors clips early in the morning and pass them on to Illini’s assistants if tweaks or additions prove useful.
The results reflect crustal movements and the occasionally unstable footholds associated with crustal movements. Illinois is working on some kinks, and she ranks 43rd in adjusted offensive efficiency as of Wednesday morning.2 top 10 wins UCLA When texas Also, 2 losses in 2 Big Ten games. But Underwood says his team, specifically, has a decent offensive efficiency rate where he has 1.1 points per possession on a five-out offense. Illini is still effective around the rim (57.2% of his shooting from 2-point range), sometimes absent on block at all. As of Wednesday, they had just 5% of his possessions finished in postups, tying him for 283rd nationally. (they finished zero The 45.4% 3-point rate is also the highest during Underwood’s tenure, and the coach wants this trend to become the norm. Increased isolation has lowered his overall assist percentage, but he has seven players in Illinois averaging 8 or more points per game. And all in all, the Illini family owns about four more per night than he did a year ago.
“You can find a lot more than just settling for a half-court set,” says Melendez. “If you have the pace, you can look for the first bucket of migration. It’s easy and makes the court more open, and you have a lot of chances to steal the ball or find open looks.”
Or, as Hawkins puts it, “I think it creates a lot of confusion.”
This is something Underwood hopes to avoid in the future by welcoming it now.
Unfortunately, college basketball players are often on loan, he says. It’s sad that he’s come to think like a junior college coach again and expect certain players and him to only work together for two years. He fought that reality in Illinois with some success. Ayo Dosunmu and Cockburn both played in Champaign for his three seasons, and Illinois has more true freshmen than transfers. he would prefer to build. At least he tries to.
But reality is reality. Underwood understands that too. A man who was once in high spirits as a passerby of the same generation, André Courbero, currently playing for St. John’s. Players come and go. So a Cockburn-centric system wouldn’t work without Cockburn, but this rewired system should be people-agnostic. Yes, Illinois coaches will probably need to regularly find big men like Hawkins who can trigger offense for optimal results. Starting with three freshmen to recruit, it should generally work out no matter what.
And doing so should mitigate any insidious differences college basketball throws at Illinois. “I’m counting on it,” Underwood says as Christmas music plays softly from one of his two large TVs in his newly renovated office. “I think we can build a system. I guess.”
Reinventing is not easy. However, the final product has the potential to simplify everyone’s existence.
If this works and it sticks, Illinois could be one of the teams in the polls that doesn’t have to worry about identity. Each year I get a very clear picture of who I am and what I want to achieve. All that remains is to be good at it.
“Most players just know their game, and good players can fit into the system,” says Mayer. “If we get Hooper and put in some core sets, we’re going to be a good team. That’s what we really need.”
(Illustration: John Bradford/ athletic; Photo: Ray Del Rio/Getty Images)
