Welcome into the O'Anonquire podcast. It is Jeremy Warner and Mike Latua up here to talk some of

Illinois basketball, of course, a heartbreaking gut-wrenching loss at Michigan State 80 to 78 on Sunday.

But Illinois still rises in the rankings, two spots after the big win over Indiana.

I think some people saw that Michigan State game, Illinois, still pretty good, despite the foul issues.

We'll talk about that.

We'll talk about the reasons Illinois lost this game as well.

We'll talk about a big week ahead with two home games against Maryland and Northwestern.

Michael Tito Powell, are you, buddy? I'm good. I'm good. Just, again, I think I mentioned this every time,

but just being in the thick of it, you know, between personal life, work life, basketball life. It's just, wouldn't trade it

for the world, man. A lot of basketball happening, a lot of life happening. But here we go, Mike.

This is a tough loss for Illinois. Obviously, the Big Ten race changed with this game. What a huge win

for Michigan State and what a

blow of a loss for Illinois when it had a chance to win this game. And they missed free throws.

They missed three-pointers. They had a five-minute stretch at the end of that first half that they

really regret. So they have their own blame in this loss. But there's a lot of files in this game and some questionable files in this game.

And the referee impact is part of the story.

I don't love bringing up referees a lot.

You know, we don't do that very much.

But it certainly felt like the referees had an impact on Sunday's loss

with Casper Seacchionis getting in foul trouble and following out within nine minutes and multiple of those calls

looking questionable to me. What was your thoughts on that entire part of the game? Because

it was a big part of the game. I mean, it's interesting, just the broader discourse around it.

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