Illinois Basketball: Underwood Era Begins

I'm going to start with a little research/analysis.

Illinois actually had some good starts during the Groce era. The best was in 2012-13, when the Illini went 12-0 including winning the Maui invitational and a road win against #10 Gonzaga.

In 2014-15 they started 6-0 and were #1 in scoring through the first couple weeks.

So the question I want answered is: does a good start or non-conference translate to end of the year success?

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(For the rest of this I'm going to use the fall number year for ease of use.)

Groce was coach for 5 years. 2012-2016.

2012 - NCAA 2nd round
2013 - NIT
2014 - NIT
2015 - nothing
2016 - NIT

First of all yikes. But let's see if the starts can tell us anything.

Here's the non-conference schedule:

2012: 13-1
2013: 11-2
2014: 10-3
2015: 8-5
2016: 10-3

So based only on that, yeah it seems like if you have 5 losses, don't make any postseason plans. And if you want to go to the tournament, try not to lose more than one non-conference game.

Let's go deeper to the conference records.

2012: 8-10
2013: 7-11
2014: 9-9
2015: 5-13
2016: 8-10

Surprisingly, this data tells you less than the non-conference data. Looking at that there's no way to think that 2012 was the only NCAA appearance.

So...let's go Underwood! These games actually matter!