Welcome in to the Illinois Inquirer podcast.

It's Jeremy Warner, Derek Piper, live at State Farm Center, where we saw the first loss here for Illinois since they lost to a very highly rant at the time.

Marquette team.

This one, an unranked team.

Derek, Illinois joins the crowd.

A lot of top 10 teams losing to unranked teams.

And of course, it's Maryland.

Illinois is just awful against Maryland.

I looked it up 10 and 3 since Maryland joined the conference.

They've beaten Illinois 10 out of 13 times.

This has been a terrible matchup, but Derek, why did Illinois fall by nine points?

And again, they let it at halftime.

What was your biggest takeaway?

Oh, man, some ugly offense for sure, especially in the second half. They couldn't make anything, even at the rim. Now, Maryland, that's one of their strengths. It's the top 25 defense, and they're really good at defending with Julian Reese is one of the better shot blocking bigs and the Big Ten. And then also, I mean, this is a team that has good size.

So I think that from a matchup standpoint, outside of Jemir Young, they matched up pretty well

with, of course, Illinois who wants to use their size against other teams and find those

matchups. But, you know, Dante Scott on Ty Rogers or the size they could throw at Marcus

Damascul, he got going there in the second half.

And then defensively, that was probably the biggest thing that surprised me,

because Maryland has been just flat out awful offensively for pretty much the entirety of this season,

one of the worst shooting teams in all of college basketball.

Didn't shoot it particularly well today.

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