Inside the turnaround at Illinois: How Brad Underwood got the Illini back

Winners of seven straight games and tied with Michigan State atop the Big Ten standings, Brad Underwood has Illinois basketball back where they belong.

It took a little longer than expected but Illinois basketball is back.

On March 18, 2017, the University of Illinois announced it was hiring Brad Underwood to be the 18th head coach of the men’s basketball team — he would be the school’s fifth coach since 2000. His predecessors included Lon Kruger (current head coach at Oklahoma), Bill Self (current head coach at Kansas) and Bruce Weber (current head coach at Kansas State).

Together, that trio had won 5 Big Ten conference titles and made the NCAA Tournament 12 times with Weber leading the team to the national championship game in 2005. Yet when Weber left in 2012 to take the Wildcats job, the program experienced a substantial drop off.

John Groce was brought in from Ohio to replace Weber — the school was unable to land Shaka Smart or Brad Stevens, leaving Groce as their third option. However, despite accumulating a winning record in his five seasons (95-75), the team never finished better than seventh in the conference and only made the NCAA Tournament once.

This time around, the school was able to land one of the big names in their coaching search when they lured Underwood away from Oklahoma State after one year in Stillwater. Before that, He was the head coach at Stephen F. Austin for three years and took the Lumberjacks to a March Madness birth each season by winning the regular-season and conference tournament in the Southland Conference.

The Illini would go 14-18 and 12-21 in Underwood’s first two seasons on the job. In those two years, the school saw seven players either transfer or leave the team including current DePaul starter Jalen Coleman-Lands.

Things looked bleak and the pressure was growing rapidly among the fan base. If Groce’s tenure in Champaign did not meet expectations, Underwood had managed to underperform even more to start his time with the program. Coming into this year, a Big Ten preseason media poll in the Chicago Tribune projected that they would finish seventh in conference play.

But there is one simple way to remain off the hot seat in college coaching, recruiting. In the 2017 class, he secured two four-star guards (Trent Frazier and Mark Smith — though Smith would eventually leave) and he followed that up by keeping five-star point guard, and the best high school player in Chicago, Ayo Dosunmu in-state in 2018. That alone would have been a job-saving signing, Illinois was also able to add Alan Griffin (son of former NBA player Adrian Griffin) and Giorgi Bezhanishvili from New Jersey powerhouse St. Patrick High School to complete their class.

Underwood hasn’t slowed down on the recruiting trail yet, he has once again landed the best high school player in Chicago, Adam Miller, and is pairing him in the backcourt with Andre Curbelo from Long Island Lutheran. Coleman Hawkins of Prolific Prep rounds out the three-man class for 2020 so far.

This season, Bezhanishvili, Dosunmu, Frazier and Griffin serve as key pieces on this current Illini team that sits in second place in the Big Ten and is just half a game back of Michigan State in the standings. Dosunmu returning for a second season was a big boost to the program. Many projected him to be a one-and-done type of player regardless of the freshman season he had. As an athletic, 6-foot-5 point guard who had a knack for exploiting any crevice presented in defense, he seemed to fit the profile of someone an NBA team would want as a prospect.

The player that has elevated this group to the top in 2020 is freshman center, Kofi Cockburn. The Jamaican-native came to Illinois by way of Oak Hill Academy after spending his first three years at Christ the King in New York. Cockburn is listed at 6-foot-11 and 290 pounds, there aren’t many players in collegiate sports who can match those measurables. Thanks to that advantage, Illinois is absolutely destroying teams on both ends when he is on the court. According to ESPN, the team is converting 53.4 percent of its shot attempts inside the 3-point line and are holding their opponents to 87 points per 100 possessions.

Defense has been the team’s calling card this year. They are allowing a Big-Ten best 60.1 points per game in conference play. Having Cockburn patrol the paint helps but he’s tied for 10th in the conference for blocked shots (15) and sixth for defensive rebounds (55).They rank dead last in steals per game as a team so they aren’t forcing a high amount of turnovers, rather they play solid man-to-man defense and force teams to take tough shots. They are currently second in 3-point field goal percentage defense (27 percent) and field goal percentage defense (37.8 percent).

They are not explosive offensively either, they only average 65 points per game, but their plus-4.9 scoring margin is the second-best in the conference through 10 games. Underwood has brought his spread offense with him to Illinois.

Having the court open helps both Cockburn and Dosunmu have enough room to operate. Cockburn is often the lone Illini member in the paint, which makes it harder for teams to double him without allowing an open shot elsewhere. Underwood also will use player movement and screens to create good shots for his players.

Meanwhile, Dosunmu has improved his overall game and is now a threat to score from the perimeter and in the paint. He leads the team in scoring at 16 points per game and Cockburn is the only other starter who averages double-digits (14.4 PPG).

Despite beginning 2020 with a 20-point blowout loss in East Lansing, Underwood’s team has run off seven straight wins and have found their way into the Associated Press Top 25 Poll for the past four games. They are 19th in the country and travel to Iowa City on Sunday to take on the No. 18 Iowa Hawkeyes.

A slow start nearly doomed Underwood, now, things are looking better than they have in more than a decade.

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