Illinois and the new preview calculus

When the best you can do is trust a coach to figure stuff out

If you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a very good chance you’re familiar with the work of the Three Man Weave. If that’s somehow not the case, the 3MW are three similarly ill hoops sickos who have been writing excellent in-depth college basketball analysis for years — particularly specializing in summertime previews that have always been essential reading, filling dreary offseason content gaps and getting the analytical juices flowing before most folks even start thinking about previewing the season to come.

They’re at it again this summer (this time publishing under the Burner Ball Discord banner, where, for what it’s worth, I recently did a fun Ask Me Anything just before embarking on family summer vacation), and they’ve already dropped what might be the most interesting preview of what might be the most interesting team of the 2024 offseason: Illinois.

How it works is that each Weave writer submits a preseason ranking, and then all three average their ranks together. Usually, Jim, Matt and Ky see teams pretty similarly. Some rankings bands are wider than others, but there’s usually broad consensus. This is not unlike the widely held views that tend to form among media members and analysts about certain teams throughout the offseason. Favorites are established; sleepers are unveiled; former sleepers almost instantly become overrated. Like-mindedness is natural. Groupthink is hard to avoid. By the time folks start actually voting on preseason players awards and team conference rankings at media days, results have lost the capacity for surprise.

Not with the 2024-25 Illinois Fighting Illini. Get a load of this:

From the Weave’s 2024-25 preview of No. 42 Illinois

As you can see, opinions on the 2024-25 Illini vary spectacularly within a single piece from a single publication. Imagine what the rest of the world is going to make of this team.

Seriously: What would you make of this team? You can see the reasons why opinions will vary in the very next lines of the file. Look what Illinois lost. Look what remains. Look at the remarkable number of new players on this roster, none of whom had ever shot around together, let alone ran an offensive set? What should you make of this team? What should anyone?

It gets you thinking: Is it even possible to have an opinion? Is there any point in trying to predict how a team like this will pan out? Five years into the portal era, have we reached the stage where the stakes of team previews are so low as to be nearly nonexistent? Rather than guess, and preemptively rank, and set out some strong opinion about how good a phantom squad is going to be in advance, why not just wait and see how things pan out?

Seriously: What’s the point?

The best and easiest answer, obviously, is that it’s fun. In the case of a roster like this Illinois, it’s probably more fun, because what’s more enjoyable: The certainty of a fixed returning rotation, or the wide open possibilities of unproven talent?

Illinois certainly has that.