There is NCAA tournament expansion on the horizon, and the Illinois basketball team's past would have been different with the proposed changes.
A generation of Illinois basketball fans knows how ugly we have had things in the past decade or so.
There was a solid chunk in the 2010s when the Illini were somewhat of a laughingstock. We couldn’t land the big recruits, and the pinnacle of the sport, a national championship, wasn’t even a possibility, as Illinois couldn’t make the NCAA tournament.