So before the official line comes out, or
you’ve seen it—give me the line you’d need to see to
actually put $$ on OHIO to cover? If the line was ___ and I was in Vegas, I’d take OHIO? What’s your number?

"Illinois fan sites: Illinois Royalty Orange & Blue News "

Someone made a funny. The link takes me to Illinois Loyalty.

Just don't end up like the last couple times we played Kansas.

25+ for a significant amount of money.

For $20 I'd put it on the Bobcats at almost any line out of principle. And love. IF I'm in vegas.

This Illinois team is a “once in a generation” kind of deal.. They are special. I hope the Cats can finish within 20 points. If they keep it under 20 I’ll be impressed.

Will be interesting to see what the tightened rotation is regarding players and minutes I'm expecting to play 7-8-9 players, not the whole bench like the first two games.

Against NCAT Illinois hit 17 of 33 threes; against ChiSt they put up only 18 and hit just seven. They still hit 60% from the field.

They've gone with a small starting five in the first two games -- Cockburn plus four guards -- and still outrebounded NCAT and ChiSt 117-28.

In order to make a game of it, we can't afford 21 turnovers like we had vs NCAT.

I nailed it as I see ESPN is listing the game as OHIO +18. I also bet we’ll see that line tick up a hair before tip off with money coming in on UI

My post was supposed to say “we *need* to knock down some 3’s” lol

This looks like our toughest matchup in years. As someone mentioned above, looks like they’ve been playing with 1 big and 4 guards so hopefully that means BVP and Roderick can get some clean looks from 3 using their height. Roderick was 6-9 from 3 yesterday, hopefully he gets going again.

I know you cannot read too much into games that are total mismatches but my first thought when looking at the line opening at 16 was that apparently the oddsmakers gave Illinois almost no credit at all for two very, very lopsided win. Those blowouts were so easy that it seems to me like they should have changed one's opinion of the Illini for the better. I was just looking at the Massey ratings, and while computers want to put more weight on more even matchups, those blowouts moved Illinois up to his #1.

But I'm going to flip this on its head. Instead of wondering what -16 says about Illinois, let's think about what it says about Ohio. So I'll start with some assumptions:

1. The people who place lines are among the best prognosticators in the country. This makes pretty good sense because a lot of powerful people risk losing a lot of money if the hire people to do it where there are other people out there that are better than them.

2. The oddsmakers opinion of Illinois is consistent with the polls as the #8 team in the nation. This is more of a guess but it is the best that we have to go on at this point.

3. The 16 point opening as a road game means that they think Ohio is about 13 points worse than Illinois overall which should be pretty close.

4. So what does being 13 points below #8 mean for Ohio. Ordinarily, that would mean that they think of Ohio as about #60 or #65.


The Power 6 conferences are pretty far ahead of the rest of D1 these days. Ever since the American and Big East broke up and CUSA lost several programs to the American there are only 12 conferences that have computer averages above the D1 average rating most years. That's the P6 plus the American, MWC, A10, MVC, WCC, and MAC. The MAC does this by have almost no teams ranked 200+. The MAC has depth such that most of its teams can make the #25 team at least work for it a lot of the time. What the MAC has been comparatively awful at for twenty years now is producing those top 50 teams that get in on the bubble discussion at the end of the year. So, my point is that in a lot of years being #65 would make you arguably the best team in the MAC.

One comment on the Illinois board is, "Does Preston want to transfer?"

Probably going to go to hell in the second half but we look like a very well coached team right now. I'm guessing they're going to clamp down on Preston hard.