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At this time next week, the Illinois Fighting Illini men’s basketball team will make its first appearance in the Associated Press Top 25 poll for the 2026-27 season.
Rumor has it they’ll likely appear somewhere in the top five.
In case you were curious, the last time the Illini were ranked in the top five nationally to start a college basketball season, the guys pictured below were playing. Remember them?
They were pretty good.
But I have bad news for the millennials and older readers of The Champaign Room:
There are kids walking the University of Illinois campus today who weren’t even alive for “Illinois-Arizona.”
So let’s not be nostalgic. It will only make us feel old.
Instead, let’s take a look at the more recent past so that we might learn for the future. And maybe, just maybe, we can finally move on from 2005.
In the past six years, the Illini have:Made six NCAA Tournament appearances in six seasonsWon a Big Ten championshipWon two Big Ten Tournament championshipsReached the Elite EightReached the Final Four
It goes without saying, but there’s something missing from that list that we’re all thinking about. Something that’s been missing for as long as Illinois basketball has existed:
A national championship.
To achieve such a thing, any team needs a lot working in its favor:
You need a competent coaching staff, which Illinois has.You need talented players, which Illinois has.
You need them to stay healthy, which remains to be seen.You need to win every regular-season game you can to ensure the highest possible tournament seed and, hopefully, the best path available to a national championship.You need to go undefeated from about mid-March onward.
That being said, you can have nearly all of this go in your favor and still come up short. That’s one of the aspects of this pursuit that is so maddening.
Conversely, you can come up short to some degree in one of the first three realms and still find a way to win it all.
But that’s rare.
NCAA Tournament seeding is…
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Publish date : 2026-10-15 10:30:00
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