The Illinois men’s basketball team earned a No. 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s Midwest Region and will face either Texas or Xavier on Friday in Milwaukee.
The game time and television outlet will be announced later Sunday.
No. 11 seeds Texas (19-15) and Xavier (21-11) will meet in a First Four game in Dayton, Ohio, to determine Illinois’ opponent.
The Illini enter the NCAA Tournament at 21-12 after losing in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals to Maryland 88-65 on Friday. That was among their worst losses of the season, next to a 110-67 beating by Duke on Feb. 22 at Madison Square Garden.
Between those losses, Illinois won four straight games in promising fashion: two against Iowa, at then-No. 13 Michigan and against then-No. 18 Purdue. Now, with a few days to prepare, the Illini will look to regain some of the swagger they found during the winning streak.
Guard Kylan Boswell said he’s confident the Illini can regroup, but they need to better monitor their intensity to match the win-or-end-the-season stakes.
“When the ball is not going in, our energy can drop and wave,” Boswell said Friday night. “That comes also with being mature. But we can’t let that happen in March. Watching this film will be huge, and then Coach (Brad Underwood) getting on our (butts) will be big for us.
“They’re going to feel me for sure. If I feel like the energy is dropping, I’m not going to go out like that. I don’t think we have those issues consistently. It’s just at times our group energy can die down. You can’t let that happen in March.”
Texas enters its First Four game coming off an 83-72 loss to Tennessee in an SEC Tournament quarterfinal Friday. The Longhorns are led by freshman guard Tre Johnson, who is averaging 19.8 points, three rebounds and 2.8 assists.
Xavier ended its regular season on a seven-game winning streak but lost in the Big East quarterfinals to Marquette 89-87. Musketeers forward Zach Freemantle, a 6-foot-9 grad student, is averaging 17.3 points and 7.1 rebounds.
This will be Illinois’ fifth straight NCAA Tournament appearance under Underwood. Last season the Illini advanced to the Elite Eight for the first time since 2005 before losing to eventual champion Connecticut and finishing 29-9. But that was an almost entirely different team, except for reserve guard Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn.
This Illini team is led by first-year international recruits Kasparas Jakučionis, Tomislav Ivišić and Will Riley, transfers Boswell, Tre White and Ben Humrichous and Chicago-native freshman Morez Johnson Jr.
They are a young group except for a few, including Boswell, a junior guard who played at Arizona, and White, a junior guard who played at Louisville. On Friday, Underwood blamed that youth for their poor energy and showing against Maryland — and some of their extreme highs and lows this season.
Underwood took responsibility for not having the team ready for its second game in two days in the conference tournament. He promised to address some of the issues this week, including a poor start against the Terrapins, to have the Illini ready for the national stage.
“When we’ve gotten off to good starts, we’ve been pretty good,” Underwood said Friday. “Tonight, we got rocked. It’s about getting off to a good start.
“We’re not tough enough yet. We’re not disciplined enough yet. We’re not gritty enough, nasty enough to fight through a poor start. We’ve got to be better than that, and that’s what we’ll spend a lot of time talking about in the next couple of days.”
Jakučionis is the Illinois star, a potential high first-round NBA draft pick from Croatia who is averaging 15 points, 5.6 rebounds and 4.6 assists. But the Illini have four other players averaging double-digit scoring: Ivišić, Riley, Boswell and White.