Stan Olson’s Blog

It’s amazing to think how bad the Illini have been the past few years. This is the first season that I’ve actually watched entire games and enjoyed them. The Illini looked pretty good today especially with the running game. Hopefully next week we will be ranked in the top 25, though I’d just rather see us in a BCS bowl game. I know, it’s way too early to talk about that stuff but Illinois is for real this year. Congrats!!!

Full story from FightingIllini.com

I was pretty impressed with the first half of the game by Illinois. We held VT to 21 points and had 29 of our own points. In the 2nd half we increased our lead and things looked positive for a potential SIU/ILL matchup on Sunday. Unfortunately VT had other plans as they brought a very impressive full court press. The problem wasn’t beating the press, it was getting sloppy once we broke it. Weak lazy passes were very common and it helped VT get back in it. There were several questionable no-calls in the final seconds that should probably have been called, but I can’t blame the refs for this one. Illinois gave the game away. They handed it to VT and they weren’t going to pass it up. We played stupid basketball, just didn’t use their heads. It’s very depressing as we had the game and played wonderful defense. I was hoping we’d pull it out to prove that we belonged in the NCAA tournament instead of the NIT. Now I’m not so sure if we did belong there. Illinois broke the win streak of the Big Ten as they were the only one to lose in the first round. What makes it so upsetting is it wasn’t lack of hustle, skills, talent, but just the fact they didn’t use their heads and buckled under the pressure. With Carter and McBride gone next year, I’m not sure if we’ll be any better. But I don’t even want to think about it right now. Weber needs to turn things around next year and some how get it through the player’s heads on how to play smart basketball. We blew way too many games this year when we had the lead.

P.S. Kansas won by 40….
P.S. GO CUBS!!!

28-12. No, that’s not the score, that’s how many fouls each team had. 37-9. Again, not the score but the amount of free throws attempted by each team. I’ll give you one guess as to who had the higher numbers. Illinois played a great first half minus the last few minutes that Arizona was able to creep a little closer. The aggressiveness of each team picked up in the 2nd half with each team trading buckets for a stretch. The refs got whistle happy (a common theme these days) and Carter was forced to go to the bench early in the 2nd half with his 4th foul. Then Pruitt picked up #4 followed by McBride and Brock. Late in the 2nd half, the refs missed several fouls committed against the Illini and Coach Weber lost his cool. The refs of course had no problem blowing a whistle and giving him a technical foul. So in the end, the Illini lost 84-72. The lovely storyline was that Arizona overcame a 16 point deficit to win the game. Granted it wasn’t even close to the Illini’s 15 point comeback in the final 4 minutes of the game back in 2005. Positive factors included a great performance by Carter as well as the team looking really dominating in that first half. As we all know, you have to play 40 minutes of great basketball to win the game. Hopefully these guys will continue getting better while we await Randle and Smith’s return from the land of the injured.

I honestly expected the Illini to get blown out and that looked to be the case early in the game. However, the orange crush helped the Illini battle back in the second half to take the lead for a short time. Down 3 late in the game, the Illini made a defensive stand but then Maryland stole the ball and scored. That pretty much sealed it for Maryland. I was surprised that Weber didn’t put Jamar Smith in the game to provide a spark. He was pretty non-existent when he did play, so maybe that’s why he didn’t see much time late in the game. I shutter to think how tough playing Arizona will be in a few days. I guess I’m still spoiled by our magical run from a few years ago. Reality check time Stan, the Illini are rebuilding. :-)