July 31 – The first games of the 2024-25 college basketball season are 100 days away. The NCAA tournament? That’s a little further. Selection Sunday is March 16, and the top four starts two days later.
But it never stops being a good time to talk about bracketology. Even months away from basketball being played and even more so from it being particularly relevant to where teams might fall along various lines of classification.
The latest news has Illinois as a No. 7 seed, playing at Milwaukee in the first round (a boon for Illini fans) against Miami (an opportunity for a little revenge from the 2012 tournament).
Illinois is one of 10 Big Ten teams in Lunardi’s 2025 NCAA Tournament field. A group that includes Rutgers, Oregon and Maryland on the right side of the bubble, as well as Michigan, Indiana, Michigan State, Purdue, UCLA and Ohio State. He’s super at the top of the Big Ten if you consider he has Nebraska in his first four outs and then USC, Iowa and Wisconsin in his next four outs.
In total, there are 14 of the now 18 teams in the league. Sorry, Northwestern, Minnesota, Penn State and Washington.
If Illinois finds itself in the NCAA Tournament in 7 1/2 months, it would mark five straight appearances for the Illini under Brad Underwood. And I’d give Underwood a six, considering the 2019-20 team was there before the tournament was wiped out by the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, five is the longest streak for a single Illinois coach since Lou Henson’s eight in a row from 1983-90.
