It was obvious to Illinois’ players long before Sunday’s game was over that they were on their way to a 19th check mark in the ‘L’ column and not down some yellow brick road to the NCAA tournament.
“I think a lot of people just called it quits,” junior guard Calvin Brock put it bluntly.
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Well, it’s just as well.
A team beaten this many times really has no business being rewarded in the same way as a North Carolina or Memphis or UCLA. I mean, come on — March isn’t that mad.
Even the end-of-the-line Illini themselves couldn’t bring themselves to take a 61-48 loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten tournament’s title game too hard.
“It wasn’t like it was a heartbreaker,” senior center Shaun Pruitt said.
No, no last-second shots this time. No fourth sweet upset in four days. No crumpling to the floor and crying out in agony at the injustice of it all.
Illinois just plain ran out of, well, everything … gas, time, luck, you name it.
“It probably looked like we were tired physically, but I think it was mentally and emotionally,” Brock said. “A lot of people just put their heads down.”
He meant in the second half, when the Illini never threatened Wisconsin.
They threw in the towel with their third-lowest point total of a lousy 35-game season.
And so, the NCAA selection committee was spared.
A spot wouldn’t need to be found for a ninth-place Big Ten team that would have crashed the party with one of the NCAA tournament’s poorest records of all time.
No howl of protest would need to emit from the mouth of Seth Greenberg, the outspoken coach of Virginia Tech.
After claiming it would be “certifiably insane” to leave his own Hokies out of a 65-team field, Greenberg pointedly stuck a pin in the Big Ten in a Saturday interview at the ACC tournament in Charlotte.
“We whoop up on the Big Ten every single year in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and they’re talking about maybe a fifth team [from the Big Ten to the NCAA field]? It’s absolutely absurd,” Greenberg said. “It’s ludicrous.”
Chill out, coach.
Illinois isn’t in. Neither is 2007 national runner-up Ohio State. We concede the point, the Big Ten this season wasn’t exactly the Western Conference of the NBA, OK?
It is true that the Big Ten has produced only one NCAA tournament championship team since 1989 — Michigan State in 2000.
And, all right, so letting the Illini into this year’s dance would have been a little like turning a skunk loose in a beauty spa.
Rules are rules, though.
If they could have come up bigger against the Badgers, then the gang from Champaign would have been totally entitled to tag along to the next party.
“It just didn’t work out,” freshman guard Jeff Jordan said in the losing team’s locker room at Conseco Fieldhouse. “But it built up our emotions a bit. The way we played in this tournament gives us confidence for next year, now that we finally found the right way to do it.”
A couple of starters, including Brian Randle in his final college game, hit only one more shot in Sunday’s game than Michael Jordan’s kid did.
This wasn’t exactly the way a senior wanted to go out.
“It hurts to leave,” Randle said. “It’s almost like Illinois is the Mom and we’re the kids.”
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What hurts more is the remarkably bad season the Illini had.
“I know the guys coming back are going to have a bad taste from this year,” said junior guard Trent Meacham, who didn’t have much to savor himself Sunday, not scoring a point.
No one knows how good Illinois could have been if Jamar Smith and Brian Carlwell hadn’t been involved in that car accident, or if Eric Gordon hadn’t been talked out of attending Illinois by a corrupt Indiana coach.
All we do know is that the Illini nearly sneaked into the NCAA tournament with a neat back-door play.
You know what they say, the 19th loss is the hardest.
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