Ham For Thanksgiving

Alabama. Arkansas. Tennessee. Missouri. Duke. Five top-50 (ish) non conference opponents.

I wrote in the schedule post section of our pre-season preview that I thought these five games represented the toughest group of power conference opponents we’ve seen on the schedule in Brad Underwood’s eight year tenure at Illinois.

I was excited to see a schedule like this come together because I believed it provided us with a glimpse into how good Underwood thinks his team can be this season. Which is all fine and dandy - in October. Come November and December (and oddly February) when you actually play the games, well, you darn well better win some of them. Otherwise, the rough and tumble schedule ends up as nothing more than window dressing.

You don’t secure a protected seed in the NCAA Tournament in the pre-season, but you can stake a pretty solid claim to one. The conference season will ultimately do the heavy lifting in that regard, but if you don’t have any marquee wins before the new year then that lift becomes quite heavy indeed.