CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Another Monday evening brings Brad Underwood to Papa Del’s Pizza Factory and the stool located a couple hard lefts inside the front door. Awaiting him are a glass of ice water, a headset and maybe 10 tables of locals here for the Illinois coach’s weekly radio show. The proceedings begin promptly at 7 p.m. with applause and rivalry game talk: The annual Braggin’ Rights game against Missouri is three days hence. And one of the keys, Underwood reveals early on, is explaining to his team exactly what Braggin’ Rights is.
Or some of his team, anyway. Earlier, two freshmen asked Underwood to break down the significance of a series 42 seasons old. When identifying players to meet the media to preview the game, it occurred to Underwood that only two active, healthy Illini had any experience in it. Assistant coach Chester Frazier could get the team riled up, recalling his four years of Braggin’ Rights battles. Beyond that? Forget animosity compounding over time. The transitory nature of the sport made something so entrenched seem like a novelty shop curio.
“It’s a different world,” Underwood, 59, tells the audience in conclusion, and what else is new for a coach in the middle of a redefinition, going after something sustainable in the screaming face of constant change.
In short: Illinois is nothing like what it was a year previous. It doesn’t look the same. It doesn’t play the same. The results are similar – the Illini are ranked No. 16, with two top 10 wins – but the whole operation works on different math.
Underwood and his staff welcomed in Year 6 in Champaign by almost totally undoing and redoing a system in months. A post-up heavy team now rarely posts up. A coach who never switched on screens now always switches on screens. Illinois is an emblem of the quick-twitch flexibility required to survive in the era of ever-revolving rosters – as well as the path to building an identity in modern college hoops, avoiding annual reinvention. “The key was sustainability over the course of time,” Underwood says. “What I mean by that is, ‘OK, let’s find a way to play that we can recruit to.’ Yeah, we found Kofi (Cockburn) and we put shooting around him and it worked. We’re not finding that again. So let’s go figure out how to play and what that looks like. It’s a way that obviously the NBA plays, but it’s also a way that I think you can recruit to. And now it’s turned into who we are.”
It’s not this way everywhere, all the time. Scan those national polls, and you find some programs with hard-boiled identities, regardless of roster composition. Alabama plays fast and shoots 3s north of 40 percent of the time. Virginia walks the ball up and defends. And so on. Doesn’t matter who comes and goes. The plan is the plan. But it was bound to be this way for Illinois, this time, when a 7-foot, 285-pound center with the gravitational pull of an event horizon left town, among others. By the time everyone restocked their cabinets in the offseason, only 18 programs wound up with less season-to-season minutes continuity than Illinois, per KenPom.com’s reckoning.
The new Illinois, though, is likewise years in the making. Even before signing the aforementioned monolith, Kofi Cockburn, Underwood knew he might never again find another specimen like that. When Cockburn was farther along than expected as a freshman, Underwood knew it was only a matter of time before his program’s systems would revolve around the 7-footer’s particular skill set, and also only a matter of time before Cockburn would leave and Illinois would have to gin up new ways to operate. An eye to a post-Kofi existence led to recruiting bigger wings such as current sophomores RJ Melendez and Luke Goode, both of whom are multi-positional 6-7 pieces. It had Underwood, whose first head coaching job was at Dodge City (Kansas) Community College in 1988 with stints at Stephen F. Austin and Oklahoma State before landing the Illinois job in 2017, watching Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors and EuroLeague tape. But all that more or less amounted to ordering appliances and staring at renderings before the demo crew rips the place down to the studs and the real work begins.
Full renovation commenced following a second-round NCAA Tournament loss to Houston in March, which only reinforced Underwood’s plan. “Undersized, hard to guard, had fours and fives who could shoot it,” he says. “They were a pain in the neck.” Within days, during the standard end-of-season meetings, returning players learned that their summer would be a version of basic training: a near-complete abandonment of post-ups and high-lows in favor of learning a five-out offense predicated on driving and cutting and spraying the ball around, all done at a pace that, ideally, could push 80-plus possessions per game. Or more.
The core philosophy wouldn’t change. Get the ball into the paint and go from there. Closer you are to the basket, the better your chance to score. Old school, as Underwood puts it. Everyone would just follow new directions to the same place.
During the 2021-22 season, 14.1 percent of Illinois’ offensive possessions ended in a post-up. Tied for 15th-highest in the country, per Synergy Sports. It was a game plan with an expiration date of March 20. “They were literally saying since the year ended we were going to play a lot faster, a lot of things are going to change, we’re going to wear people out,” Melendez says. “And we’re doing it right now.”
(Michael Hickey / Getty Images)
Plucking talented, experienced, productive wings from the transfer portal was important, but the arrivals of Terrence Shannon Jr. (currently Illinois’ leading scorer) and Matthew Mayer (averaging 18.7 points in his last three games) were more effect than cause. Mayer, in fact, says he didn’t watch a single second of Illinois game film from 2021-22 during his evaluation of potential landing spots. It was totally irrelevant, based on Underwood’s pitch. “I knew we had the pieces,” Mayer says, “so I thought we’d be able to put it together.”
The challenge is, of course, successfully installing a system in months, with a roster that’s more than half new. There were reference points for the few holdovers; when Cockburn was injured or in foul trouble, and playing through the post wasn’t a priority, the offense morphed into something like what it would look like in 2022-23. But those were traces of an identity. Doing it as the rule, and not the exception, required a ground-up build.
How to throw a shake pass. Learning what go screens and blur screens are, and how to use them. How to attack a close-out. No one skipped ahead; Coleman Hawkins logged almost 900 minutes of floor time in his first two seasons, but the junior-to-be found himself absorbing lessons on dribble hand-offs, and how one executes a dribble hand-off, and what the reads are depending on how defenders react, and so forth.
He’d learned all that as a freshman. It was, in ways, remedial and boring. But what was old was new again. “Basic, Day 1 stuff,” Hawkins says. “It wasn’t like my sophomore year when everyone already knew that stuff, and we’re literally just working on skill. This was getting to the fundamentals of our offensive principles.”
A shift in thinking, too, was required. Illinois mostly spaced its players on offense and rarely cut to the paint, because Cockburn was there. “So there was no sense,” Underwood says. Now cutting would be emphasized. Now the Illini had to relearn behavior, not just a physical skill. See the back of a defender’s head? Cut, immediately, for the rim. “We don’t have that threat in the paint, so now we have to move to find people open,” Melendez says. “It’s a little more difficult, but it moves the defense a lot more. They’re going to make a mistake at some point.”
In some ways, Illinois’ roster turnover was an advantage. Freshmen learn everything for the first time, anyway. Mayer played in an almost identical system at Baylor, easing his assimilation. Meanwhile, the overall buy-in is about what you’d expect from players given freedom to read and react; Hawkins has been known to scour Warriors clips into the wee hours and pass them along to Illini assistants, in the event they prove to be useful tweaks or additions.
The results reflect the tectonic shift, and the occasionally unsteady footing that comes with one. Illinois is working through some kinks, ranked 43rd in adjusted offensive efficiency as of Wednesday morning. It has those two top 10 wins against UCLA and Texas and also two losses in two Big Ten games. But Underwood says his team has a satisfactory offensive efficiency rate of 1.1 points per possession in its five-out offense, specifically. The Illini are still effective around the rim (57.2 percent shooting from 2-point range) without, sometimes, any presence at all on the block; as of Wednesday, they were tied for 283rd nationally with just 5 percent of possessions finished with a post-up. (They’ve finished zero possessions with a post-up in three of their last seven games.) The 3-point rate of 45.4 percent is also the highest of Underwood’s tenure, a trend the coach would like to become the norm. Even though an increase in isolations has brought the overall assist rate down, Illinois has seven players averaging eight or more points per game. And, on the whole, the Illini are getting about four more possessions per night than they did a year ago.
“You can find a lot more stuff, rather than settling for a half-court set,” Melendez says. “With pace, we can look for the first bucket in transition. If we don’t find anything there, we can run a set and not let the defense get set. It’s easier for us and opens the court a lot more. We have a lot more chances to score the ball and to find open looks.”
Or as Hawkins puts it: “I think it causes a lot of chaos.”
Which is what Underwood is hoping to avoid in the future, by welcoming it in now.
It’s sad, he says, that college basketball players often are rentals. It’s sad that it has occurred to him to think like a junior college coach again and only expect to work with a given player for two years, tops. He has fought against that reality at Illinois, with some success; Ayo Dosunmu and Cockburn both played three seasons in Champaign, and Illinois has more true freshmen on its roster than transfers. He’d prefer to build. At the very least, he’s trying to.
But reality is reality. Underwood gets that, too. A guy he once gushed about as a near-generational passer, Andre Curbelo, now plays for St. John’s. Players will come and go. So while the Cockburn-centric system wouldn’t function without Cockburn, this rewired system should be somewhat personnel-agnostic. Yes, Illinois’ coaches probably have to regularly find Hawkins-like big men who can trigger the offense for optimal results. But it should work, generally, no matter what, starting with a three-freshmen recruiting Class of 2023 that is ranked in the top 20 nationally.
And, in so doing, it should mitigate any insidious variances college basketball throws Illinois’ way. “I’m banking on that,” Underwood says as Christmas music plays softly through one of two massive televisions in his freshly renovated office. “I think you can have a system. I do. It’s why we went to this. I think our system can sustain, and if (players) stay, then it can be special.”
Reinvention isn’t simple. The end product, though, might simplify everyone’s existence.
If this works, and it sticks, then maybe Illinois becomes one of those teams in the polls that doesn’t have to worry about identity. It will know who it is and what it wants to accomplish, very clearly, every year. All that’s left is being good at that.
“Most players just know their game, and if they’re good players, they can fit into the system,” Mayer says. “If you get some hoopers and then you put in some basic sets, you’re going to be a good team. That’s really what it takes.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photo: Ray Del Rio / Getty Images)
