Now that’s more like it. I know – an awful thing to say.  Michael Orris will work tremendously hard over the next 5 years to make his dream of playing Big Ten basketball a reality, and here I am, already pushing him aside and focusing on our shiny new top-100 recruit. Such is the life [...]

A solid start. That’s the box I’m going to put this Jalen James commitment in.  We needed a point guard, and we needed to get the ball rolling with the 2013 class, and we accomplished both. James is no slouch, mind you – Rivals has him as a 4-star and ranks him #78 in their [...]

Around the time Alex Legion left the program, opening up a scholarship that could be used immediately, I remember thinking that the 2011 recruiting class would be 4 players. Now, it’s 7. Huntington Prep big man Ibrahima Djimde picked Illinois over Old Dominion today, becoming the seventh member of this signing class.  One transfer (Sam [...]

Approximately 19 seconds ago, Mike Shaw announced that he has chosen the University of Illinois. This is big for three reasons:  1) It’s about time we won one of these drawn-out recruitments, 2) We’re now probably the 6th most talented team in college basketball for 2011/12, and we still have two open scholarships, and 3) [...]

So Illinois picked up a basketball recruit last week.  I wanted to write something at the time, but a little birdie had told me that Rivals and Scout would be updating their rankings this week.  And given that Mychael Henry was unranked by either service at the time, I wanted to wait until those rankings [...]