Get a bunch of kids together who have a high BB IQ, dismiss their efforts with a bunch of smack, motivate them even farther along by putting a B1G banner in their sight, sit down your top scorer, give his replacement shooting vertigo and you have the perfect, almost unbeatable opponent.
This NW team appears not to believe they have any weakness which is far more important than any statement to the contrary by any fan.
If our Illini can get away with a win tonight, I will consider it the most significant and important win of the season simply because the Wildcats have displayed a much higher level of consistency and competency than any opponent other than UCLA. There is a lot more at stake than any other game to date. Will we get Jekyll or Hyde?
What I hope to see is nothing bizarre in the way of negatives. Hit some shots, don't throw any passes to the other team or the Orange Crush, and make Buie and Audige work hard to get off every shot. It will be a battle, unless one team suffers the random night....good or bad.
Don't want to beat this to death but I just don't agree with much of this, and if the bolded is true, I like our chances for the rest of the season.
I've never understood why some folks always want to ascribe wins and losses to some intangible thing or some character issue when so much of it is just luck, or the other team having a bad night, or natural discrepancies in how games are called. You could literally change one call in four games and Illinois would be sitting in second with Northwestern looking up from the crowded field. Having a team like Iowa shoot 3-24 from three has way more to do with what kind of night Iowa had than any self-belief that Northwestern might have had that evening.
You want to know what the big difference between last year's Northwestern team and this year's is? Last year they lost a passel of one- or two-possession games. This year they've won a lot of those. That's one bounce, one call, whatever. If Northwestern wants to believe that it's something they've done, more power to them. But clapping louder will not cause Tinkerbell to live.
I'm sure after writing all of this out that we'll manage to lose this by two points, and folks will be up in arms because we had the ball 94 feet from the basket with four seconds to go and couldn't draw up a miracle play to tie it. But the fact will remain that you could change one call and the outcome would be reversed. That's not to say that what the teams do on the court doesn't matter, but it's not all that matters by any stretch of the imagination. I don't understand why folks are so invested in completely dismissing luck as a factor when it clearly plays a massive role in how a basketball game plays out.
Sorry, I beat this to death. I'll do better next time.
