Welcome into the online inquire podcast.

It's Jeremy Warner, Derek Piper, live at State Farm Center, where Illinois looked like, hey, maybe they get a break, 15.5.

5 point favorite against Indiana. It was without their star center, potential first-round draft

picklow where. Maybe Illinois can have a nice bounce-back performance. A little more comfortable

than that as Illinois finds a way to escape with a 70 to 62 win over Indiana. Yeah, it was a pretty loss against Northwestern, but it's a loss.

It's an ugly win against Indiana, but it's a win, Derek.

But that was not all that encouraging, and it was just not a great brand of basketball.

But Illinois finds a way to score the final eight points of this game and avoid a quad three loss. So it feels a lot

better to feel bad about a win than to suffer another loss that probably takes you completely

out of the Big Ten race, to be honest with you. It's better to win when you suck than lose when you

suck. I think that's not really all that profound, but it's the truth. And it's one that you avoid a disaster because that

would have been another quad three on your home court. Yes, it would have taken you out of the

Big Ten race barring some kind of just fall from both Wisconsin and Purdue. A lot of things to

break down within this. I think that Indiana just had more energy and toughness for a lot of the

day. Illinois did not

execute very well offensively. Indiana with their size, they'd have something to do with that, but

it just felt like the ball stuck and stagnated. Terran Shannon still is not anywhere close to the version

that we saw pre-suspension, so all that baked into it. And a game in which Indiana didn't hit one three.

It went all the way until the final minutes, and you couldn't, then you can finally pull away from

them. So Malik Renew was hard for Coleman Hawkins to handle. And Illinois kind of puzzling,

it was puzzling that they didn't double as much.

I know they were trying to dig down with the guards.

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