Mission Accomplished

I've referenced the whole "we need to go 9-1 leading up to the Purdue game" many times now. You're probably tired of hearing it. But we pulled off the "go 9-1 across these 10 games" thing tonight, and I would like to celebrate it.

Here's what I wrote about it back on December 9th (the night of the Ohio State game):

The schedule from now until Purdue:

at Ohio State (#35)
Nebraska (#42)
Missouri (#44)
Southern (#209)
at Penn State (#110)
Rutgers (#136)
at Iowa (#27)
at Northwestern (#59)
Minnesota (#111)
Maryland (#99)

And then at Purdue (currently #6 on KenPom). The toughest two games in that stretch? At Iowa and at Ohio State. Mission accomplished in the first one, so now the goal is to go 9-1 in those 10 games and enter the Purdue game on January 24th 17-3 and ranked... 6th in the country?

My math was bad and I was off by one (I double-counted the Ohio State game) so we're now 16-3, not 17-3. And we're not 6th in the country, we're 11th in the country. But 9-1 was achieved. ✅

4-0 on the road (plus the Missouri win in St. Louis) is probably the most impressive part. At the time, I thought we'd beat Nebraska and then lose one of the four Big Ten road games (likely Iowa). We lost to Nebraska (have you heard?), so we then had to run the table.

We ran the table. And Underwood now has the second 8-game winning streak of his Illini tenure. (I won't tell you how that one ended because it ended in the second round of the NCAA Tournament when the 8-seed we faced was a KenPom top-10 team).