Austin Illini Club
Austin Illini Club
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2006-2007 Austin Illini Game recaps: Tough Home Loss to Maryland, 7-1 Loss to Xavier: Don't Give Up Yet Losses to Michigan and Ohio State; Still Hope Easy Win against Minn; just what we needed Close, but not enough against Wisconsin; Grudge Match with IU next Illini begin Sampscum rivalry 1-0; Eric Gordon Saga Revisited Back on Track; big win against MSU Winning Streak!! Illini put Gophers away Win streak to 3 with win over Wild-Kittens Jamar Smith and Brian Carlwell injured in severe car crash Board of Trustees Retires Chief Illiniwek Illini win Chief's final two games Offensive collapse at Iowa; Big Ten Tournament Preview; 2 Football Starters dismissed from Team Illini advance to Big Ten Tournament Final Four!! Loss to Wisconsin in Big Ten Semis; NCAA Tournament preview and analysis Disappointing First-Round NCAA Loss to Virginia Tech
Illinois 2006 Schedule and Results are the following for the next month:
All Times Central. Home games in Orange; Away games in Blue.
Illinois won its two exhibition games against Lewis (83-58) and SIU-Edwardsville (76-57). Illinois opens its 2006-07 season this Monday, November 13, against Austin Peay, famous for its chant, "Let's go Peay" that we enjoyed a few years ago when Illinois played Peay in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Unfortunately, neither that game nor the November 15 game against Jackson State will be televised. The first televised basketball game will be next Friday, November 17, at 7:00 against Georgia Southern. As of now, we plan to gather at Texadelphia in mid-Austin. A map to Texadelphia is on the basketball page of the Austin Illini website. In a bittersweet sense, this season also marks the first without any of the starters from the 2005 Final Four team. But time must move on, and this team has some talent of its own. Nonetheless, with Dee and Augie gone, Illinois fell out of the rankings for the first time in years, which I frankly don't mind too much. It is always better to give a young team some incentive to prove itself instead of allow it to rest on the laurels of past success. Illinois schedule is also incredibly favorable this season. We play only two tough non-conference games against Arizona and Xavier. (Some have picked Xavier as a dark horse candidate for the National Championship, somewhat as this year's Florida). We also play Maryland in the ACC-Big Ten challenge, but they are not as strong as previous years. As for the Big Ten season, we play the two toughest teams--Wisconsin and Ohio State--only once, both in Champaign. We thus have perhaps the easiest Big Ten schedule in the conference. With that home court advantage, Illinois has a very realistic shot at contending for the Big Ten Title again this year, even without Dee or Augie. _____________________________________________________________________________________- In basketball, Illinois is 2-0 so far, but has three starters out: Brian Randle (groin) and Jamar Smith (ankle) are both injured and Rich McBride is serving a 4-game suspension for a recent DUI. However, the bench has picked up the slack rather aptly so far. The first televised basketball game is tonight against Georgia Southern, available only on ESPN's Fullcourt premium package. Texadelphia does not have the Game Plan package right now, so we will gather at Legends tonight at 7:00 to watch the Georgia Southern v Illini game. (I will be there late). If you missed it, Michigan State beat Texas last night in a close game. (Go Big Ten!) Everyone and their sister had predicted that Michigan State will be awful this year, but their new talent seems incredibly well coached. MSU will be tougher than expected, and if they continue to play as well as they did last night, they will be up there contending for the Big Ten Title with Ohio State, Wisconsin, and us. ________________________________________________________________________________________ Illinois won a close game against high-scoring Bradley, and advanced to 7-0 on the year. Illinois next faces its first significant challenge of the year when it plays #19 Maryland in Champaign on Tuesday at 6:00 in the Big Ten-ACC challenge. We will gather at Ringers Tuesday night at 6:00 to watch the Illini-Maryland game in High-Definition.
Tough Home Loss to Maryland, 7-1November 28, 2006
Illinois plays Arizona today in Phoenix at 4:00. The game will be broadcast in high definition on ESPN. Unfortunately, Ringers is booked solid with college football league championships and could not give us the sound for the game. But in our never-ending (albeit slightly belated) quest to find another centralized, high definition venue for loyal Illini who want to watch the game together, we finally found one. We will gather at 3:50 today at BBGs (off Northbound I-35 just past 2222/290) to watch the Arizona game. BBGs has several high definition plasma screens and wi-fi, is locally-owned (no more "Fox and Hound" fiascos), and has good food and drink like Ringers; but it also has convenient parking, is "family friendly" (all ages), and... has a section of leather couches in front of two 50-inch plasma screens that they have reserved for us for today's game. The address is 6901 N I-35. From the North, take the St. John's exit, go past St. John's to 2222/290, take the turnaround into the Northbound frontage road. After a few several hotels, BBG's will be on the right about 1/2 mile after 2222/290. From the South, also take the St. John's exit, but BBGs will be on the right shortly after the exit ramp, before you reach St. John's. Please join us to watch the Illini bounce back from their tough loss to Maryland at home last Tuesday.
As for that loss... alas, our worst fears of watching the entire team stand around in cruch time last year waiting for Dee Brown to do something came back to haunt us. Illinois had come back from an awful start (down 14 in the first half) to regain control of the game in the second half. With about eight minutes left in the second half, Illinois led by 5 and looked as if it had gained solid control of the game and would pull away to another solid home win, especially considering its home court poise. However, Maryland hardly missed a shot down the stretch, shooting 72% in the second half. Greivis Vasquez scored 15 of his 17 points in the second half. Nonetheless, after exchanging leads down the stretch, and with about 2 minutes left and Maryland up only 3, Illinois made a great defensive stop and everyone turned downcourt for Illinois to play the final note on a solid comeback win. However, Rich McBride failed to see a reversing Maryland player (Greivis Vasquez) and casually threw the ball away to him deep in the backcourt on a lazy pass to Meachum. Not only did the player score a quick lay-up, but the play completely deflated the Illini and the home crowd, especially after such a great defensive stop and momentum going the other way. The entire vibe on the team, the stadium, and even down here at Ringers went from confidence to fear. And this young team struggling to find a go-to guy only made us all feel even more worried. Stiil, the game was not over. Down only 5 with under a minute left, we made another solid defensive stop and still could snatch the game back. But then Chester Frazier dribbled the ball casually upcourt instead of pressing, and then aimlessly ran around the perimeter with the ball trying to find an opening that didn't exist and that he couldn't create on his own. Instead, he ran down at least 25 seconds and threw a desperate brick up to essentially seal the win for Maryland. (Apparently he couldn't hear us all screaming from down here for him to hurry up and pass the ball, but it wasn't for lack of effort or volume, I promise you.) Now, I have been criticized as a partisan Illini fan who thinks the Illini only win games, whereas bad refs cause all our losses. And they have a good point based on four recent NCAA tournament losses where we did, indeed, receive the short end of some awful officiating: Arizona in 2001; Duke in 2004; North Carolina in the Championship of 2005; and Washington last year. But games like this one provide the clear counter-example. Maryland not only stole the game with clutch play down the stretch, we made it easy for them to do so. We lost this game when we had several opportunities to win it. As Bruce Weber aptly noted after the game, "We shouldn't lose at home, I don't care who's here. We gave up 72 percent shooting in the second half. I understand the competition's good, but that shouldn't happen at home." The "that" is not just the loss, but the execution breakdown in crunch time. Nonetheless, the Illini did have solid moments in coming back from down 14 and in keeping the game close even with Maryland shooting 72% in the second half. Weber is bringing this team around to his up-tempo, team-oriented system that does at all rely on a single hero or two. As we all know from the past several years, Weber creates heroes, he doesn't recruit them. And it will be interesting to watch for the creation of the next Deron Williams, who is developing into an all-star guard in Utah. Moreover, griping over the end of our NCAA-best 58 non-conference home winning streak really makes us sound like unappreciative Duke fans who overlook the rather impressive fact that we were SPOILED by such a fantastic home win streak. Although it is nothing to smile about, Illinois basketball has not become a failure simply because we are no longer winning every... single... game. We all knew this would be a transition year, and we need to enjoy how this transition unfolds. Just remember what we all thought when Bill Self bolted for Kansas and Brian Cook (the last star of the 2001 #1 NCAA seed team) graduated. Where do we go from here? We develop and support a new Championship-caliber team.
Loss to Xavier: Don't Give Up YetDecember 29, 2006
Illinois opens the Big Ten season against Michigan tonight in Ann Arbor. The game is only available on the ESPN FullCourt premium package, so we will gather at Champions Sports Bar tonight (Wednesday) at 7:15 to watch the Michigan game. Champions is located downtown inside the Marriott Hotel at the corner of 4th and Trinity. All-ages are welcome. Bagpipes worked well for us, but there is a potential conflict with the Kansas State club for sound there throughout the season, so the Executive Committee decided to give Champions a try tonight.
As for the Xavier game, Illinois dropped a disappointing 65-59 loss to Xavier in Cincinnati to close the non-conference schedule 12-3. The game started horribly as Xavier sprinted out to a 16-point lead in the first five minutes. Illinois clamped down on defense and came back to take the lead at halftime, 26-25, but that pathetically-low score foreshadowed Illinois' offensive problems in the second half as Illinois could not respond to Xavier's defensive adjustments that, frankly, most decent high-school teams could have handled. Now, this loss might return some of the fair-weather, bandwagon fans back into hibernation (if they have not already fallen asleep) because Illinois is clearly struggling to find its offense. Defensively, this team has adapted and does quite well when it turns the intensity up; but the team that the NCAA has labeled "hostile and offensive" for its school symbol simply has lost its offensiveness. In particular, Xavier threw an odd 1-2-2 zone at Illinois (1 man at the top of the key, and the other four arranged in a box along the free throw lane) for a crucial stretch of the second half, which succeeded in disrupting Illinois' perimeter passing at the top of the key. Illinois simply looked befuddled and couldn't recognize that this zone defense was stretched out by playing so high up at the top of the key. The answer then would have been to use the motion offense to move players down along the baseline (play three players on the baseline, while keeping one guy at the top of the key to keep the defense stretched) so that one of those three players (presumably the middle guy) would have been open. The 1-2-2 zone also opens up the middle quite a bit, and could have allowed us to simply dump the ball inside for either an open basket or a quick dump to the outside; the point being that using the extra floater at the top of the key usually leaves too much space open close to the basket for the zone to work effectively. That's why most zones run in a 2-3 formation, with a big man under the basket to clog up the lane and prevent inside shots. However, with the cross-court perimeter passing upon which Illinois relies so much cut off, our offense completely stagnated and didn't respond. Now, this loss might return some of the fair-weather, bandwagon fans into hibernation because Illinois is clearly struggling to find its offense. Defensively, this team has adapted and does quite well when it turns the intensity up. The "flat-line defense" that made the 2005 team so great remains strong at Illinois. However, nobody has stepped up to replace Deron, Dee, and Luther as our primary scoring options from 2005: players that not only can score under pressure, but who can draw attention from the defense and create scoring opportunities for the rest of the team. Dee Brown tried to do it last year, but was undersized and simply not good enough to do it all himself. Most have looked to Brian Randle to step up this year, but he lacks the killer instinct and leadership to take the reigns. In Bulls parlance, he is more like Scottie Pippen who would thrive with a guy like Michael Jordan on his team, but struggles without another leader to take the bulk of the pressure. Rich McBride has also disappointed so far, and has struggled to recover from his early-season suspension and petty legal troubles stemming from an offseason DUI arrest. Jamar Smith--last year's freshman sensation--also has been spotty as he tries to fully regain his shot and recover from an early-season high ankle sprain. So we have come to the precipice we all feared, and we all should just stop watching games and give up on this team. We all know that Weber is not nearly as smart as I am and couldn't possibly recognize what this team needs to do to improve: at least not with the clarity and perspicacity that I (and other poser-critics like myself) uniquely possess. Of course, we might be wrong and miss how Weber turns this team around, just like he did in 2004 after the Augie-Dee-Deron-Luther-Powell team opened the Big Ten season 1-2 (losing back-to-back to Northwestern and Purdue at home). You remember... the team that opened the season a lowly 11-4 (they wished it was 12-3) before going undefeated for the rest of the Big Ten Season; the same team that lost its only tough non-conference games that year to North Carolina and Providence... kinda like we lost our only tough non-conference games this year? "What?" you might ask, "Our favorite 2005 Final Four team--perhaps the best college team of all time--went through a tough spot in 2004 before they went on a tear in the latter half of the Big Ten season to win the Big Ten? I didn't remembe |
