Who are you and what have you done with Gritty......
Underwood got the job and in his first year basically comprehensively failed and fell flat on his face, but he changed what he was doing in time and figured it out.
He had a team way too young and inexperienced to compete that second year, but he grew them up fast and by February we were competitive.
After our long awaited resurgence got the rug pulled out in the cruelest possible fashion by Covid, he managed to keep things together and push it to new heights.
Everything that was planned for last season blew up into a disaster immediately and he retooled on the fly into a totally new system and we (briefly) were dominant.
The roster shockingly collapsed after last year and his staff just reached out and grabbed big time players at all of our positions of need.
I didn't even mention that this is a guy who has had to replace his whole staff twice and nailed it both times.
I have my doubts about some individual aspects going into next year and beyond. But I don't know how I could still doubt that whatever goes wrong, the second solution will be better than the first. We've got Coach MacGuyver, he'll figure it out.
For a decade all of my doom and gloom was completely justified and accurate. Actually it was far too hopeful if anything. Illinois football and basketball were fundamentally broken losing programs that found ways not to succeed. That just isn't true of basketball anymore, we have gotten over the hump, and I couldn't be happier.
All I want is for Illinois to be playing in big, exciting games (and by definition you need to win a respectable share of them in order for the big games to keep coming), the meaninglessness is the worst part of where we've been, it's just poison. I have every confidence we're going to keep playing games we're excited about for the foreseeable future, and that's like having a season of your favorite TV show coming up every season.
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