Illini win the last 5 minutes!

I am right now in the process of watching the Illinois Northwestern game on TV since I was actually in the crowd for the game tonight. All I could think about for the first 35 minutes of the game was how unbelievably disappointed I was going to be in the Illini because they were going to lose to Northwestern. My reasons for this were basically A) the Illini need to win easy road games kike this if they want to stay in the Big Ten hunt. B) Road tested teams will get big wins in the tourney. C) Most importantly, this was a home game for Illinois. I was there, it was at least 70-30 Illinois fans. I was right next to the Orange Crush, and they were amazing tonight. If Illinois lost this game, Bruce and every player should have apologized to the 5,000 Illinois fans for coming to this game and making it a home court for them, and then pissing the game away. I am writing this right now at 2 AM because obviously I had to have some beers after the game, but all I could think about after the game was "God please let the DVR work!!" So I am going to talk about what I notice now and, also what I was thinking as Yerk and I were melting down in the stands.

- First, don't kids pay at least 40,000 dollars a year to go to Northwestern? So, riddle me this? How the shit do they have only 3 ceiling fans in the place? It had to be at least 90 degrees in this glorified high school gym! I was dying, and I was not the only one. Maybe if Northwestern could sell more than 2,500 tickets a game they could afford to get some AC in the place.

- Northwestern is shooting so hot right now that if you had never seen basketball before you would think that they are actually a good team. I wish that NW had to come to Champaign because that game would be an absolute shit-kicking! You have to give Bill Carmody credit for making NW presentable as a Division 1 school. Mike Davis missing 2 free-throws pretty much set the tone for the next 30 minutes of this game.

- I am now at 10:11 in the game and it is 18-11 NW, even now I can't understand how this game is being officiated? When you are becoming an official this should be your first lesson: BE CONSISTENT!! This will come into play later in the game, but for goddamn, if you want to call cheap reaches then call them all game, if you are gonna let them play, then let them F'ing play!! Ted Hillary should either be fired, or only be allowed to officiate with Ed Hightower.

At this point in the game, NW is 4-9 from 3, and 2-3 from 2. (Right now I am thinking there is no way that this dogshit team can shot this well all game long)

- This was a terrible game for Demitri McCamey on paper before the game. The reason why is that McCamey doesn't play defense all the time. We all know it. Well in this game, not only did he have to chase his man all over the place, but he had to do it for 35 seconds at a time. To expand on the defensive point, NW is a terrible match-up for Illinois. The Illini thrive on ball pressure, denying passing lanes, and helping on dribble drives. Northwestern's offense in made to exploit ball pressure and over playing passing lanes.

- I missed the elbow that some d-bag white guy threw on my boy Calvin Brock. What the shit is going on in the Big Ten this year? My theory is that, teams are recruiting more athletic players, so less athletic idiots are getting frustrated. Joe Krabbenhoft, Devin Dumas, Zach Novak, and some idiot on NW are realizing that they are overmatched and become idiots! (For the record, Manny Harris should not be included, because his elbow to Chris Kramer's face was legit)

- Alex Legion checks in for the Illini with 5 minutes left in the first half, and guess what, he does absolutely nothing. I don't want to bash him because I believe that he will be probably our best player in the next two years, but he is bringing nothing to the table this year. People are saying that we will need him in the tournament. Why? We are 20-5 right now, and I'm pretty sure that other than the game @ Purdue he hasn't contributed to a close game that we have won. If he can come in and give us 5 good minutes at a time then we should be happy about it. There is also a bandwagon that said that he should start over Trent Meacham, and to be honest I was about to hop on it, (I wanted Calvin to start over Trent tonight, and I was right for the most part because Coble ate his lunch in the paint) but Trent finally did what I have been asking him to do his entire career: Win a game for us!! He did it tonight. It is really easy to drop 25 on a D-2 school, but in crunch time, if you can step up then I will always love you.

- Every post player for NW traveled with the ball at the top of the key, and now I will start my Kevin Coble rant. Coble is a good player, he is a better version of Tim Doyle which means that he doesn't just score on junk. That being said, he works officials so much with his flopping and flailing that it is a shock to me that he doesn't play for Duke!! This is the perfect system for him because he can shoot outside, drive on players that are bigger than him, and post up smaller players than him. Back to walking, Coble shuffles his feet more than any player in the Big Ten, watch him when he is posted, it is like watching Dirk Nowitski it is so bad.

- To start the second half, Illinois came out playing great, but NW matched them pretty much shot for shot. McCamey drills 2 3's in a row and then I jinxed him by saying that he will drop 30 tonight. With 5 minutes left in the game I was about to take all the blame for us losing this game.
- Coble flops like a douche, and thank god he gets called for a foul. Mike Tisdale couldn't knock over a toddler fighting for position, let alone a 6 foot 8 college basketball player. Gotta love having Steven Bardo doing this game. He just said that Coble pulled a "Mel Gibson". I'm pretty sure that he meant that Coble was acting, not that he was being an anti-Semite or a misogynist. It must have killed Bardo to announce this game impartially because I'm pretty sure that even a front-runner Illini fan who can't name more than 6 players on the team was screaming at the TV during the first 35 minutes of this game.

- The most frustrating part of the second half for Yerk and I was the fact that Klye Rowley, who is 7 feet tall and 280 pounds switched out on our guards at least 5 times and they did nothing with that mismatch!!! That however is one of the knocks on a motion offense, it exploits teams that can't keep up with the movement and use space created by screens for open shots. It is not an offense that looks to create mis-matches to create shots.

- Again gotta love Bardo, gotta hate the refs, and gotta hate the guy who is calling the game with Bardo because he is now officially an idiot. Coble drives baseline, gets double-teamed, picks up his dribble, jumps in the air and then drops the ball to the ground. When he picks it back up again, he passes it back out and there is no travel called. Bardo's partner, who we will now refer to as numb-nuts, says that it is okay because he "let it go, it bounced, if he would have picked it up then it would have been, but it hit the floor." What a fucking idiot!! (sorry Gerald, I had to) New rule for announcers: Learn the rules of the sport that you are calling before you start telling your partner (who was a great college basketball player) that he is wrong. Listening to some of these idiots like numb-nuts is like me becoming an anchor on Power Lunch on CNBC because I took an advertising class in college.

- The score is now 51-37 NW with 11:15 left in the game. NW only scores 8 more points for the rest of the game. This is amazing based solely on the fact that Illinois was trailing in this game until the last 3 seconds, yet they did not have to foul at all to come back. Gotta put this one on the coach right? If each possession takes the entire 35 seconds then there is only 19 possessions left for both teams. If Illinois shoots the ball in 10 seconds every time, it means that there are 15 possessions. If you are up 14 and you play your game, it means that Illinios has to score 14 points in 7 possessions, so they basically have to be perfect down the stretch. Isn't this what the Princeton offense was designed to do? How do you not run down the clock, prepare for a press, and try to get to the free throw line? Illinois would have had to foul so that NW would not use the shot clock. Instead they shot early in the shot clock, when they beat the press, they held the ball in places that they could be trapped, and allowed Illinois to trap on missed shots. In reality, teams should only be able to press when they can do it on an in-bounds play, But NW never pushed the ball into the front court to make Illinois foul to save time. This is one of the biggest melt-downs I have ever seen from a major college team.

- 7:27 left and the score is 51-41. Another terrible call by the refs. Chester deflects a ball off of Nash out of bounds, but the ball stays with NW. This wouldn't be to hard to stomach if the ref wasn't 2 feet away. Numb-nuts actually agrees with Bardo that this is a bad call after watching it in slow motion. However he thinks it went off of Nash's leg even though the ball was never below a midget's waist. Maybe Play-by-Play guys should also have to pass a vision test? For the record, NW has had 6 possessions in the last 3 minutes, and 2 of them have lasted less than 15 seconds, and the other 4 lasted less than 25. They haven't scored yet. Bill Carmody is begging the Illini to win this game. This is the first possession that they have had that they have ran the clock down past 10 seconds.

- 3 more questionable calls: Demitri drives, gets bumped and hacked but there is no call. Chester ties up the token foreign guy for NW but gets called for a reach, and Mike Davis gets called for a goal-tending. I can agree with the goal-tending, because it is too close not to call, but on Demitri's play, when you are calling every dribble drive a foul at the hoop, how can you not call a guy contesting a shot by touching McCamey's arm and bumping him with the body? Also Chester had his right arm wrapped around the ball. I know many of you (all 5 of you who read this) are thinking "At least we got the calls at the end of the game!" My point is that you should never have a game where you don't make these calls in the first 38 minutes, but all of the sudden you let change your officiating style at the end. JUST BE CONSISTENT!!!!!

- 5 minutes left and I have to acknowledge on point that I made during the game that almost made Yerk and I call the I.N.S on each other. I can't stand Mike Davis' body language during the game, and so I compared him to Brian Randle. Now before you act like I just crapped in your Corn Flakes, I said that emotionally he acts like Randle used to act. Every time he makes a bad play or misses a shot, he hangs his head. Everytime he gets called for a foul that he doesn't agree with, he puts his hands behind his head and just stares in disbelief. I am not comparing his game to Randle, because as soon as Mike Davis put on an Illinois uniform he was a better player than Randle, I just can't stand the emotional roller-coaster that this kid goes through during a game. However, Randle used to do this at leaast 10 times a game, Davis has ! or 2 moments like this. Can you imagine if he had McCamey's mind-set? This kid would be unstoppable!! However, since he doesn't, he allows his emotions to take him out of games for long periods of time. Score is now 57-45, and NW has run it's last 2 possesions down to the end of the shot clock. Here is where everything goes crazy, and to be honest, I pretty much blacked out the next 5 minutes due to shear excitement, so I can't wait to see what happens!!

- Illinois uses a full-court press/trap for the first time in god knows how long. Obviously NW was not ready for this because Trent steals a pass and gets an easy lay-in. If any of you can remember the last time Illinois used a full-court press please let me know because for the life of me I can't remember. And playing full court man is not the same as a full court press.

- McCamey hits the first free-throw of the game after Kevin Coble jacks up a 3 with only 13 seconds gone on the shot clock. Numb-nuts refers to the crowds excitement as a "Bronx cheer" which is exactly what I said in the stands. I now hate myself for having the same train of thought as a douche bag!!

- I hate when Bruce subs in Jeff Jordan for defense, because you are stuck with him on offense for the next possesion. In theory this would work if you have enough shooters on the floor, but when your line-up is JJ, Brock, Chester, Meacham, and Davis, who can create anything if there isn't any open shots? Also here is another blown call when Coble travels before he calls timeout. Bardo saw it, and made sure that everyone knew about it. To go back to my point earlier about NW traveling, if you look their guards when they penetrate and then pick up their dribble, they either drag their pivot foot, or switch them enitirely. NW used to always get called for this, but not tonight.

- When Mike Davis missed his lay-in I thought it was over, and again Mike bitched about the call and then hung his head. I love this kid, and there is no way that we have 20 wins without him, hell we probably wouldn't have 10 wins without him, but for the love of God Mike, stop pouting!!!

- Bardo calls it when he says that "this finish for NW has and erie feeling to it like the Purdue game" and Trent drills a 3! Calvin set a good screen, and also got run over, but huge shot by Trent Meacham. I will not doubt this kid the rest of the season, and he is no longer on the verge of joining the Brian Randle/Dick McBrick club for me!! 59-56 NW 59.4 seconds left.

I can't really do the last couple plays justice, so thanks to Soham for e-mailing me the link to the last 6 minutes.