From Late-Season Slide to Final Four: How Illinois Turned It Around

Illinois is back in the Final Four for the first time since 2005, which is funny because, for much of February and early March, the Illini looked a lot more like a team that might be packing for an early tournament exit than one preparing for college basketball’s biggest stage.

The talent was always obvious. The ceiling was always high. But as the regular season wound down, Illinois kept giving observers reasons to wonder whether any of it would actually matter in March.

Now it does.

The Illini have won four straight games to reach the Final Four, and they have done it by flipping the one thing that seemed most likely to doom them: their defense. A team that spent the final stretch of the season leaking points and inviting chaos is suddenly getting stops, controlling games and looking every bit like a legitimate national title threat. That kind of switch doesn’t usually happen this late in the year. But the Illini are living proof that it’s called March Madness for a reason.

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The end of season collapse

Before this run, Illinois closed the regular season and conference tournament by going just 4-5 over its final nine games. That’s not exactly the sort of momentum that makes a fan base start browsing Indianapolis hotel prices with confidence. If anything, it made the Illini look suspiciously like one of those talented-but-aimless teams that everyone spends all year hyping before watching them trip over their own shoelaces in March.

The biggest issue was not that Illinois lost. It was how it lost.

In those five defeats, the Illini allowed an average of 89.4 points. You don’t need advanced analytics to understand why that’s a pretty awful recipe for postseason survival. Opponents got comfortable too often. Guards got downhill too easily. Defensive possessions dragged on too long. The Illini had too many moments when they looked more interested in trading baskets than getting stops.

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That was what made the late-season slide so frustrating: Illinois clearly had…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/season-slide-final-four-illinois-233956430.html

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Publish date : 2026-03-31 23:39:00

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