The exhaustion excuse would hold some weight if the teams we played hadn’t played a similar schedule in the tournament.
The compressed schedule is something that hurts a team that has so many newcomers, though. You can't prep for specific teams, and you don't have your own systems down well enough to just execute them without practice time.
How many years are we going to use the “rebuild” justification for the on court performance?
Two. To preemptively answer the question, I will lose faith if we don't show improvement as this season wears on. I'd hoped it would manifest with a few more wins, but between the schedule and Kipper's face showing up on my milk carton we'll probably have to squint a bit harder to see it.
We are averaging 75 ppg vs big boy competition.
We are giving up 85. Our offense is scoring enough points to win, and that is crazy because:
1) we take some terrible shots in transition offense. I want to shoot my tv every time we take a long pull-up 2.
That leads to...
2) we’re not super efficient to my naked eye (actual stats could prove me wrong but I have no way of checking). We never seem to hit a good rhythm cause we take a lot of quick, bad shots, and then don’t hit enough of the good ones we get.
But again, we’re scoring fine. The defense is a disaster. We suck at man, 1-3-1 and 2-3. And i will give BU some minor props for effort. We switched from a 1-3-1 to a 2-3 a couple times mid possession to try to throw X off. Yet they still took layups cause our defense is that bad.
I'm not calling you out here specifically, but I think that the current narrative is overstating both how bad the defense is and how good the offense is. In those four games you've cited, there have been an average of 75 possessions per game. That means that the offense is generating one point per trip, which is .02 below the NCAA average. It is not a good offense, and I think folks have overlooked the role that our extended scoring droughts have played in our losses. (And to your point about how they look to your naked eye, you're a lot better scout than you're giving yourself credit for.)
The defense is, in fact, worse, clocking in at 1.1 points per possession. That's not good, but context matters -- three of those four opponents have been top-25 offenses (Gonzaga is #3, ISU #18, and Xavier #25 per Pomeroy's adjusted efficiency metric). We've faced a couple of good defenses, but Georgetown is pretty pedestrian and Xavier is even worse than we are (#154 vs #112).
And, yes, with this few games it's tough to separate out the impact that the games Illinois has played have on the other teams' respective AEM numbers. But we're not the only team that they have performed well against this year. Xavier played two excellent defensive teams in Auburn and Wisconsin and scored far more efficiently than others have. And that Gonzaga team that we held to 'only' 1.07 PPP clocked in at 1.18 in its next-worst performance.
As for whether or not the system needs to change, you always want to adjust, right? But you've made another good point here -- this team is not executing on defense, so it might not matter too much what system is in place. There's been a lot of talk about what Underwood did at OSU, but I'm not sure how much substance there is to that narrative. Assuming the story is correct and that he made a change six games into the conference schedule, his team did improve from 1.19 to 1.125 PPP on defense.
But that improvement came against a somewhat weaker stretch of opponents, especially in terms of three-point shooting. Their defensive 3P% dropped by about five points, and that was a major contributor to the improvement in defensive efficiency. If you look at the four games they played to end the season -- all losses -- they got absolutely torched, giving up 1.28 PPP. Those four games were against elite shooting teams (KU, Michigan, and ISU twice), who made about half of their threes.
Maybe some of the improvement was due to a change in systems, but there were a lot of other things going on that you can point to as well.
I personally think that if this team executes, it can play pretty good defense. They did that against Gonzaga, holding them to .17 PPP less than their average by limiting the number of shots Gonzaga got up and holding them at or around their averages in shooting and offensive rebounding. They didn't do it against ISU and Xavier. (And, to reiterate, they put in very pedestrian performances on offense, scoring between 0.99 and 1.01 PPP in each game.)
Inconsistency is what you get when you have a young team, I guess. It's not going to be much fun watching them try to figure it out, but I really don't think that there's a magic bullet Underwood can fire to speed things along.