OMAHA, Neb. — Brad Underwood stood at the end of the court, looked toward the Illinois fans and saluted. Minutes after clinching a spot in the Sweet 16, Underwood wanted to appreciate the moment with the people who were there to witness the Illini making it past the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2005.
This ride, however long and bumpy it’s been, was as much about the fans as it was his team.
“I always thought I’d get here — and beyond,” Underwood said in the hallway at CHI Health Center. His hair was still wet from a water gun fight the coaching staff initiated in the locker room after punching their ticket to Boston to play No. 2 seed Iowa State on Thursday. “It’s not about that or me or getting this off my back. You guys make that up. This is a completely different team.”
This third-seeded Illinois squad, winners of the Big Ten tournament and slayers of the longstanding opening weekend narrative, was built with March in mind. It’s why they’ve constructed a roster that’s versatile enough to play and win in different ways. They can go really big with Coleman Hawkins. They’ve found success by getting Dain Dainja on the floor. They can even go smaller if needed with Luke Goode and three perimeter players.
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“I think we can kind of handle whatever we might see,” Underwood said.
Being part of a team that could have success in March was what the staff pitched to Marcus Domask last spring when the 6-foot-6, 215-pound guard entered the transfer portal after four seasons at Southern Illinois. Domask, who grew up playing on a racquetball-sized sports court in his family’s basement in Waupun, Wisc., dreamt about going on a deep NCAA Tournament run like the ones the Badgers had with Sam Dekker and Frank Kaminsky. Now, Domask is in that dream, having already posted a triple-double in the opening round against Morehead State. He added 22 points and seven assists in the second-round rout of Duquesne. He even stayed to sign autographs before jogging off the court.
“My No. 1 checklist in the portal was going to a team that could win important games, win meaningful games in March,” Domask said.
Illinois has the formula to go on a run. It has the top-ranked offense in adjusted efficiency at KenPom.com. It has one of the best players in the sport in Terrence Shannon Jr. whose burst makes everyone else on the court look a step slow. It has veterans like Domask and Justin Harmon, players who were immune to what Illinois did and more importantly hadn’t done previously in March.
“We all know what we came here for,” said Harmon, who spent the last two years at Utah Valley and two before that at Barton Community College. “We know what we’re capable of and what we need to do to win games and to get a ring.”
This reality wasn’t so clear a month ago. Illinois is still playing in late March in part because of how it responded to what players say now was a much-needed wake-up call on Feb. 21.
That night, Underwood fumed as his team blew a 14-point lead and lost to Penn State, 90-89. The Nittany Lions outscored Illinois 8-0 in the final 35 seconds. Harmon’s layup at the buzzer rimmed out. Illinois had 18 turnovers, 13 of them in the second half. Penn State fans stormed the court while Shannon looked toward the locker room.
This was rock bottom for a team that was looking to prove that the next month would yield improved results.
“That loss got our attention,” Underwood said. “It was really bad. It’s nice as a coach when you don’t have to say much. They knew.”
The floodgates opened for criticism. How could these Illini go on a deep run in March if they couldn’t even close out a game against a rebuilding Penn State team?
Players were angry — like, nobody said anything on the bus or plane ride back to Champaign kind of angry, Domask recalled. Reality had set in and smacked Illinois square in the face. This night would become an inflection point for a team that didn’t just want to win a game or two in March, but has its sights set on a national championship.
“We just had gotten too comfortable,” Hawkins said. “I don’t think we were playing hard enough, and I think we thought we were going to get away with it. … We went back and watched the film, and none of us were playing hard at all. Especially on the defensive end.”
Underwood knew how his team responded after the Penn State loss was important. Selection Sunday was three and a half weeks away. If Illinois was going to live up to its potential, if this March was going to be different, this team needed to dial it up in practice.
Underwood would follow through with the kind of workout that elicits raised eyebrows from players when asked about it.
“Coach Brad calls them a ‘Brad practice,’” Goode said. “I attribute our success at the end of the season to practices like that and that mentality.”
A late-season loss at Penn State caused the Illini to do some soul-searching. (Matthew O’Haren / USA Today)
A Brad practice goes something like this. There is no practice sheet. Players, managers and coaches usually have one so they can keep the workout moving. When there’s no plan they all walk into the gym knowing they’re rolling with whatever Underwood throws at them.
“It’s a practice where he’s trying to find the person who wants to break,” said Dainja. “He wants to try and find the weak link. It’s definitely a tough practice, but those are the practices that make Illinois who they are.”
It’s a lot of running and a lot of yelling, as Harmon put it. The workout usually comes after a particularly bad loss, but it can also happen if there’s a long layoff between games.
There was the one practice in the summer ahead of the team’s trip to Spain in which players recalled Underwood barking across the gym that the opponent was going to beat them by 40 if they kept practicing like that. They still laugh about that one.
The clunker in State College certainly qualified for a Brad practice.
“Brad is a mentally tough guy,” said assistant coach Tim Anderson. “He just felt like our team wasn’t as tough as they needed to be. There’s no way you should lose a game down the stretch like that. That’s just mental toughness.”
Underwood delivered some of the hardest practices of the season the week following the Penn State loss. After a 10-minute lift and no film session, the team got a full dose of Underwood.
“It’s a lot more defensive drills where you gotta get so many stops to get out, and if you don’t get them or get ’em in a row you just keep going,” Domask said. “There’s times where you just continue to go, no breaks, because you haven’t earned your way out of the drill yet. Those times where we’re in those stretches, those are the toughest times.”
The head coach was even quicker to send players to the treadmill after that loss too, Domask said. One gets sent to the treadmill during practice for a lack of effort, a blown defensive assignment, “all the little things that you need to do to win,” Domask said.
These practices are where Underwood wants to push his team to the brink. If they wanted to avoid the all-out, late-game meltdown again they needed this high-stress, high-intensity workout.
“Tough players win games,” Harmon said. “When we lost to Penn State it wasn’t a loss as much as it was a learning lesson. I feel like we learned a lot from that. We got way better in our late-game execution and defensive assignments. … That game really helped us grow into what we are now.”
This was the wake-up call they needed to propel them into March. Illinois has won nine of 10 games since then, the lone loss of course coming by six points to Purdue.
“Our overall intensity in practice since that loss has just flipped,” Domask said. “Since then I think there was a sense of urgency that clicked with us that we hadn’t had before that.”
On Saturday night, Underwood was handed a pair of goggles and a water gun as he stepped into the locker room. The man who molded this team’s toughness now wanted to remind his players to lighten up and celebrate this trip to the Sweet 16.
“At first, we wanted to have a small celebration because we haven’t really done anything yet like in our eyes,” said freshman Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn.
Underwood, who Anderson insists is much more of a jokester than people realize, of course, had a different idea.
The splotches of water on the ceiling and droplets on the team’s bracket were reminders that Illinois, 19 years later, has finally broken through. Players threw cups of water at Underwood as he pointed the water gun back at them. They squealed like little kids.
“It’s a cool thing to be able to look at your coach and say ‘Congrats on making the Sweet 16,’” Goode said. “That’s a big accomplishment for anybody.”
Later, players would collect the nameplates above their lockers. They’d snag the March Madness signs plastered throughout the room, too. These are all mementos from a tournament run they want to remember, one they hope extends into April.
“Coach Brad, if there’s one knock on him it’s kind of the postseason, and he was able to get over that hump this game,” Goode said with a smile. “We got four more.”
(Top photo of, from left, Marcus Domask, Luke Goode and Justin Harmon: Dylan Widger / USA Today)
