Check, check. We'll try this again.

Hopefully you guys can all hear us.

Jeremy Warner, Derek Piper, here live at State Farm Center,

where Illinois wins a basketball game by 21.6847 over Alabama A&M.

Not a great game for Illinois though, but it was a great performance by Matthew Meyer.

Scores 15 of his 21 points in the second half really gave Illinois a spurt.

They were only up one against one of the

worst teams in Division 1 in Alabama A&M and they find a way to win and we go into the press

game, a post game press conference for a second straight week, Derek, where the post game

press conference seems to be a bigger deal than the actual game. Illinois looked lethargic at

times. It looked like they lacked leadership

at times. Didn't feel like that. Brad Underwood railing into his team really worked all that

well. And they looked unconfident at times and felt like this could be a team at the crossroads,

but that Matthew Meyer was able to will them out of it. But you kind of ride a rollercoaster

with Matthew Meyer. Sometimes it can be

really fun and thrilling like it was at Texas against Texas like it was today. But then there's

some ebbs and flows of all of that. And we saw it in the postgame press conference where I think

we were going to write positive stories about Matthew Meyer kind of breaking through. And he kind of

hinted at some internal struggles with Illinois. And we'll talk about some of the specific things he said, but basically said that the him and Underwood are a little bit at odds and that this team has some things that they need to work on. Here's one of his quotes. I have my own opinions about this that I would not be saying up here on the podium. I think we got a lot to figure out internally between the players and coaches. I think it's going to be something we have to figure out in practice. He said he was really upset in the huddle to be, they were never really down in the second half, but to be so close in that game with about 11 minutes left, he said he railed into the team during a huddle, during a think is a great thing to see out of Matthew Meyer. He said it wasn't funny to me at all and people were laughing. I came in, I was pretty upset and let everyone know. I just tried to play as hard as I could, and that was about it. And then he talked about him in Underwood, kind of having differences of opinions. He did not like that Underwood pushed them really hard in practice this week,

because Underwood's focused on the future, right? He's figured about the long term. So this wasn't about Alabama A&M.

While Matt was more concerned about getting his body right, he's talked a lot about getting his body ready physically and getting his body right for this specific game.

I think I covered this fairly. Derek, I want to set it up for everybody. We listened back to the press conference. I wanted to quote him rightly, but it was just odd. It was an odd thing to hear after such a great performance by him, though this does feel like a team at the Crossroads, and we'll get into that in a little bit. But what did you make of all that from Matthew Meyer, which was a roller coaster day for him? It's a weird vibe around this team right now. And you kind of understand when you're putting some new pieces together, you're taking different guys from different programs and guys are adjusting to new roles and everything. and there's just wild swings for a very talented basketball team,

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