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CHICAGO — In a thrilling victory on Saturday, Illinois secured its first trip to the Final Four in over two decades by triumphing over Iowa.
The Illini will now prepare to meet UConn in the Final Four, following the Huskies’ narrow 73-72 win against the Duke Blue Devils during the Elite Eight matchup.
Illinois and UConn are scheduled to clash on Saturday, April 4, in Indianapolis, Indiana, marking a significant moment in college basketball.
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Despite the star-studded rosters at Arizona and Michigan and the high spirits at UConn, Illinois will take on the role of the underdog at the Final Four next weekend, an unexpected position for this seasoned team.
Remarkably, Illinois, a team that has dominated the Big Ten with the most conference victories over the past seven seasons, finds itself cast as a Cinderella story as the college basketball festivities begin in Indianapolis.
Coach Brad Underwood’s squad faces the daunting task of halting a formidable UConn team. The Huskies made a remarkable comeback from a 19-point deficit, clinching victory with a last-second shot by Indianapolis native Braylon Mullins, securing their third Final Four berth in four years.
The last two times the Huskies reached this point, they won the championship.
“It’s a UConn culture, a UConn heart,” coach Dan Hurley said. “We believe we’re supposed to win this time of year.”
All these teams do.
Arizona, led by Brayden Burries, and Michigan, with Yaxel Lendeborg, have up to nine NBA prospects between them.
The Wildcats opened as slight favorites – at plus-165 to win the championship, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. That was a shade ahead of the Wolverines, who are plus-180 after their 95-62 romp over Tennessee on Sunday.
But, in one of a few strange twists on the odds chart, the Wildcats are 1 1/2-point underdogs to Michigan in Saturday night’s second semifinal.
Illinois is a 2 1/2-point favorite over UConn and, in reality, it’s the Huskies, at plus-550, who are the biggest long shot in Indy.
Even so, the fact that Illinois – the flagship university in the nation’s sixth most populous state and a school with an enrollment of nearly 60,000 – feels most like this year’s out-of-nowhere underdog speaks more about the current state of college hoops than the Illini themselves.
They are a No. 3 seed – the highest number at the Final Four in two years. (UConn is a 2. Last season, all four No. 1s made it.)
This year’s meeting of 1 vs. 1 – Michigan vs. Arizona – is a heavyweight matchup of power teams from power conferences meeting with everything at stake.
It’s a far cry from a mere three years ago, when mid-majors Florida Atlantic (coached by Dusty May, who now leads the Wolverines) and San Diego State crashed college basketball’s biggest party.
Since then, NIL and the transfer portal have redefined the contours of player movement, another spasm of realignment has made the big conferences bigger (Arizona, now in the Big 12, was in the Pac-12 in 2023), and the high-achieving underdogs that used to make March Madness what it is have gone into a slump.
Double-digit seeds won a total of five games in this tournament (not counting the play-in round). Two years ago, they won 11 and sent one team (N.C. State) to the Final Four.
Not surprisingly, Underwood – the coach who landed on the Illinois radar a decade ago by coaching double-digit seed Stephen F. Austin to a pair of upset wins in the tournament – views his program’s trip to the Final Four more as destiny than a once-in-a-lifetime story.
It is, however, the first trip for Illinois since 2005, when it lost to North Carolina in the title game.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant,” said Underwood, whose teams have won 96 Big Ten games since 2019-20, two more than Purdue. “I’ve never doubted us getting to a Final Four would happen. I have thought we have had other teams capable. But I also know how doggone hard it is to do it.”
The Big Ten knows all about this. Both Illinois and Michigan have a chance to deliver a title for the conference for the first time since Michigan State won it all in 2000.
Illinois vs. UConn
The Illini, led by the so-called “Balkan Bloc” – a cohort of players with roots in Eastern Europe – have a potential NBA lottery pick of their own in guard Keaton Wagler.
Even so, the best-known name on the Illini roster might be Andrej Stojakovic, whose father, Peja, was a three-time NBA All-Star. Illinois is the third school in three years for the younger Stojakovic, who spent one season at Stanford and another at Cal before joining Underwood’s crew.
The task for Illinois: Figuring out who to key on across a roster that has five players who average double figures, led by Tarris Reed Jr.
Michigan vs. Arizona
The Wildcats-Wolverines game is a high-powered matchup of programs that have shown there’s more than one way to amass talent in the era of the unlimited transfer portal and big-money name, image and likeness deals.
Four of the five starters for Tommy Lloyd’s Wildcats began their careers in Tucson; the fifth, Big 12 player of the year Jaden Bradley, moved over from Alabama and has been with the Wildcats for three years.
Meanwhile, the top four players in minutes played at Michigan – Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr., Aday Mara and Elliot Cadeau – all arrived from the transfer portal.
In a twist that makes perfect sense these days, both coaches parlayed roots in the mid-majors to a spot on the sport’s biggest stage. Lloyd spent decades as a top assistant for Mark Few at Gonzaga before heading to Arizona to rebuild the program after the ouster of Sean Miller in 2021.
May led FAU to the Final Four before heading to the Michigan program that had thrived, then collapsed, under former Fab Five star Juwan Howard.
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Illinois powers its way to its first Final Four in 21 years, beating Iowa 71-59
Andrej Stojakovic made it clear the Fighting Illini have much bigger goals.
“I don’t want anybody to think this is it,” he said. “We didn’t get to the Final Four just to get there. We’re coming to win two more games.”
Freshman Keaton Wagler scored 25 points and Illinois ended Iowa’s underdog March Madness run by dominating in the frontcourt, beating the Hawkeyes 71-59 on Saturday to end a Final Four drought that dated to 2005.
“It’s better than I dreamt it would ever be,” coach Brad Underwood said. “Thirty-nine years in the business and that’s all I’m going to say about my side of this. This is about these guys.”
This will be the sixth trip to the Final Four for Illinois, which has never won a national title.
“This is what kids dream of,” said Wagler, who was named the South Region’s Most Outstanding Player. “I know I dreamed of this when I was growing up, playing in the Final Four, competing for a national championship. To be able to do it with the people around me, teammates, coaches, fans, managers, everyone, it means a lot … but we’re not done yet.”
Underwood’s emphasis on recruiting Eastern Europeans has paid off in this tournament. Tomislav Ivisic of Croatia, who stands 7-foot-1, and his 7-2 twin brother Zvonimir have shined in March.
The much taller Illini (28-8) outrebounded Iowa 38-21. David Mirkovic led the way with 12 rebounds. Illinois also outscored Iowa 40-12 in the paint.
“We were dominant on the glass from the first minute, even in the beginning of the game,” Tomislav Ivisic said. “They started the game better, but rebounding kept us in the game.”
Stojakovic, who was born in Greece but whose father is Serbian three-time NBA All-Star Peja Stojakovic, scored 17 points for third-seeded Illinois. His dad watched proudly as his son punched his ticket to the Final Four, and Wagler’s parents – who met when they played basketball at a junior college in Kansas – cheered wildly throughout for their son.
“He gets probably not near enough credit for how tough he is because he’s very unemotional and very stoic,” Underwood said of the 19-year-old Wagler. “But he’s tougher than nails.”
Bennett Stirtz scored 24 points for the ninth-seeded Hawkeyes (24-13), who knocked off top-seeded Florida in the second round as part of an impressive run under first-year coach Ben McCollum, a four-time Division II national champion at Northwest Missouri State. Stirtz played for McCollum there, then followed him to Drake and finally Iowa.
The Illini went on an 8-0 run, with four points from Tomislav Ivisic, to take a 58-51 lead with less than five minutes remaining.
Isaia Howard made one of two free throws for Iowa after that, but an alley-oop dunk by Zvonimir Ivisic pushed the lead to 60-52 with about four minutes to go.
Sage Tate hit four consecutive free throws for Iowa to get the Hawkeyes within four with two minutes to go. But Stojakovic added a layup for Illinois before Wagler made two free throws to make it 67-59.
“Our lack of shooting caught up with us,” McCollum said. “I think that we couldn’t space it, and so when you can’t space it, you can’t get to the rim. So it just became a problem where we were having to take tough 3s.”
It was the second meeting this season for these Big Ten rivals. Illinois won 75-69 on Jan. 11.
Illinois never led in the first half but took its first lead just after halftime. There were a dozen lead changes before the Illini pulled away.
Buzzkill
The game was delayed for about 10 minutes in the first half because of a buzzer malfunction that caused the horn to blare nonstop for seven minutes.
“Nothing I can control. … Just move on, move forward,” McCollum said. “It didn’t probably impact the fact that we gave up 16 (offensive) boards.”
All-tournament honors for 3 Illini
Along with Wagler, teammates Mirkovic and Stojakovic were also named to the all-tournament team for the region. Rounding out the team were Stirtz and Nebraska’s Pryce Sandfort.
ABC7 Chicago contribute to this report.
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