Dropping 105 points in a hostile building without your preseason All-American on the floor should feel like a coronation, yet Brad Underwood spent Saturday afternoon in Cincinnati coaching like a man whose house was actively on fire. Illinois beat the Bearcats 105-96 at Fifth Third Arena, shooting 52.9 percent from the field and 14-of-33 from deep while David Mirkovic sat in street clothes recovering from offseason foot surgery. Six different Illini hit double figures in an 81-possession track meet. Still, the real story of this October tune-up lives in the defensive tape and the ruthless schematic adjustments Underwood had to make when his returning Final Four roster started leaking oil on the perimeter.
My immediate takeaway from the box score is that Illinois possesses the offensive firepower to outrun anybody in the country, paired with a point-of-attack defensive vulnerability that will get them bounced in the second weekend if they do not clean it up before conference play. Cincinnati guard Tylen Riley carved up the Illini perimeter for 31 points and 13 assists in 31 minutes, shooting 10-of-18 from the floor and a perfect 8-of-8 at the stripe. When a single opposing creator accounts for that much offense in an exhibition, the scheme is telling on itself.
Why Going Under Ball Screens Almost Burned Champaign
The tactical breakdown starts with how Illinois defended ball screens and the right-hand drive. In the scouting report, the coaching staff clearly decided to play drop and duck under screens against Riley, betting he could not punish them from the arc while trying to wall off the paint. “You let him go right, and he’s a problem,” Underwood told the News-Gazette afterward. “I give him props because we were going under him (on screens) and daring him to shoot threes, and he made those. When he makes that shot, he’s a really hard guard.”
Once Riley knocked down three of his six triples to blow up the under-coverage, Illinois defenders had to fight over the top at the point of attack, which opened up the exact downhill driving lanes and live-dribble passing windows Underwood wanted to take away. That is how a guard hangs 13 dimes on a top-10 roster. Now, the optimists in the Champaign fanbase and around the Big Ten media poll will argue that giving up 96 points in an untelevised October scrimmage where the coach played 12 guys is completely meaningless once the real rotations tighten up. That excuse falls apart the second you look at who committed the mistakes: during a brutal second-half stretch where Illinois coughed up four turnovers in two and a half minutes to let Cincinnati trim the lead to 75-71, veterans Tomislav Ivisic and Stefan Vaaks were the primary culprits, combining for six of the team’s 15 turnovers on the afternoon.
Underwood certainly did not treat those lapses like harmless preseason rust. After Cincinnati opened the second half by burying three of its first four shots, he burned a timeout at the 17:43 mark right after freshman Ethan Brown hit a three-pointer just so he could rip into his defense. He also clearly wasn’t thrilled with how veterans Ivisic and Jake Davis came out of halftime after an atrocious first-half rebounding effort. “Our go rate in the first half was atrocious,” Underwood said in the News-Gazette postgame notes. “For us to be a good team and get where we want to go, we have to be 40 percent on our misses trying to get those back. Our go rate has to be 75-80 percent.”
The Freshman Backcourt Just Changed the Rotation Math
The veterans’ slow start handed me my favorite subplot of the entire 2026-27 college basketball preseason… the absolute fearlessness of freshmen Ethan Brown and Quentin Coleman. While the veterans were sleepwalking through box-outs, Brown started in the backcourt, dropped 15 points on 3-of-7 shooting from deep, grabbed five boards, and led the Illini in first-half offensive rebounding. Coleman was even more electric, logging 31 minutes and flirting with a triple-double at 14 points, eight assists, and seven rebounds, including a late second-half takeover where he accounted for 10 straight Illinois points.
Even when the offense bogged down, Illinois had two massive wings who could simply bully their way to the cup. Preseason All-Big Ten pick Andrej Stojakovic hung 24 points without attempting a single three-pointer, going 8-of-15 from the floor and 8-of-8 at the line by relentlessly attacking downhill. Alongside him, Big Ten Preseason Transfer of the Year Stefan Vaaks poured in 19 points on 7-of-13 shooting. “We’re still trying to figure out some things on the offensive end because he’s such an elite shooter — where to get him opportunities — but you can see he is a bull downhill,” Underwood told the News-Gazette about Vaaks.
Having two high-usage perimeter scorers who can collapse a set defense off the bounce takes enormous pressure off Ivisic, who finished with 13 points and went 3-of-4 from beyond the arc, and Davis, who gutted out 10 points and five rebounds on a heavily bruised ankle. Illinois ultimately won the glass 39-32 and pulled down 13 offensive rebounds for 13 second-chance points, proving they can flip the physical switch when their coach challenges their manhood.
“They beat us on a couple 50-50 balls and offensive rebounds, and great teams are going to make you pay,” first-year Cincinnati coach Jerrod Calhoun told the Cincinnati Enquirer. That second-half surge saved the afternoon, yet the defensive tape from Fifth Third Arena will be waiting in the film room before Baylor walks into State Farm Center on October 23, when Underwood has to decide whether Coleman and Brown have already earned the crunch-time perimeter minutes over the veterans who left the front door unlocked.
