In a sign of the times, the Illinii, a Big Ten team with more conference wins over the past seven seasons than any other program, will go through something of a Cinderella when college basketball’s biggest party kicks off in Indianapolis on Saturday.
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The first challenge for coach Brad Underwood’s team will be stopping a UConn juggernaut that came from 19 points down and got a logo-winning goal with 0.4 seconds left from Indy native Braylon Mullins to reach its third Final Four in the last four years.
The last two times the Huskies got to this point they won the championship.
“It’s a UConn culture, a UConn heart,” coach Dan Hurley said. “We think we’re supposed to win this time of year.”
All these teams do it.
Arizona, led by Brayden Burries, and Michigan, with Yaxel Lendeborg, have up to nine NBA prospects between them.
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The Wildcats opened as slight favorites, at +165 to win the championship, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. That was slightly ahead of the Wolverines, who are over 180 after their 95-62 win over Tennessee on Sunday.
But in one of some strange twists on the odds board, the Wildcats are 1 1/2 points behind Michigan in Saturday night’s main semifinal, a matchup of top seeds.
Illinois is a 1 1/2-point favorite over UConn, and it’s actually the Huskies, at +550, who have the best chance in Indy.
Still, the fact that Illinois — the flagship university in the nation’s sixth most populous state and a school with an enrollment of nearly 60,000 students — feels more like this year’s out-of-nowhere loser says more about the current state of college betting than the Illini themselves.
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They are third place, the highest number in the Final Four in two years. (UConn is a 2. Last season, all four No. 1s did it.)
This year’s 1-on-1 meeting, Michigan vs. Arizona, is a heavyweight matchup between powerhouse teams from power conferences meeting with everything on the line.
It’s a far cry from just three years ago, when Florida Atlantic (coached by Dusty May, who now leads the Wolverines) and San Diego State ruined college basketball’s biggest party.
Since then, the NIL and the transfer portal have reshaped the contours of player movement, another spasm of realignment has made the big conferences bigger (Arizona, now in the Big 12, was in the Pac-12 in 2023), and the high-performing underdogs that used to make March Madness what it is have fallen into a slump.
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Double-digit seeds won a total of five games in this tournament (not counting the play-in round). Two years ago, they won 11 and sent one team (NC State) to the Final Four.
It’s no surprise that Underwood, the coach who landed on Illinois’ radar a decade ago by guiding double-digit seed Stephen F. Austin to a pair of upset tournament victories, sees his program’s trip to the Final Four more as a destination than a once-in-a-lifetime story.
However, it is Illinois’ first trip since 2005, when it lost to North Carolina in the title game.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant,” said Underwood, whose teams have won 96 Big Ten games since 2019-20, two more than Purdue. “I never doubted that we would get to a Final Four. I thought we had other capable teams. But I also know how difficult it is to do it.”
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The Big Ten knows all about this. Both Illinois and Michigan have a chance to win a conference title for the first time since Michigan State won it all in 2000.
Illinois vs. UConn
The Illini, led by the so-called “Balkan Bloc,” a cohort of players with roots in Eastern Europe, have a potential NBA lottery pick in guard Keaton Wagler.
Still, the best-known name on the Illini roster might be Andrej Stojakovic, whose father, Peja, was a three-time NBA All-Star. Illinois is the third school in three years for the younger Stojakovic, who spent one season at Stanford and another at Cal before joining Underwood’s team.
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The task for Illinois: figure out who to target on a roster that has five players averaging double figures, led by Tarris Reed Jr.
Michigan vs. Arizona
The Wildcats-Wolverines game is a powerful matchup of programs that have proven there is more than one way to accumulate talent in the era of the unlimited transfer portal and big name, image and likeness deals.
Four of the five starters for Tommy Lloyd’s Wildcats began their careers in Tucson; the fifth, Big 12 Player of the Year Jaden Bradley, transferred from Alabama and has been with the Wildcats for three years.
Meanwhile, Michigan’s top four players in minutes played (Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr., Aday Mara and Elliot Cadeau) arrived from the transfer portal.
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In a twist that makes a lot of sense these days, both coaches leveraged their major league roots to earn a spot on the sport’s biggest stage. Lloyd spent decades as Mark Few’s top assistant at Gonzaga before heading to Arizona to rebuild the program following Sean Miller’s dismissal in 2021.
May led FAU to the Final Four before heading to a Michigan program that had thrived and then collapsed under former Fab Five star Juwan Howard.
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AP March Madness Bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and Coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness