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Brad Underwood: This is the best roster I’ve had at Illinois

Brad Underwood has led Illinois to a combined 47-17 record over the past two seasons as well as a Big Ten Tournament title in 2021 and a share of the Big Ten regular season title last year.

He’s had All-Americans like Ayo Dosunmu and Kofi Cockburn that have helped elevate this program back among college basketball’s elite.

But with all that said, Underwood firmly believes that the roster that he’s about to coach this season is the best one that he’s had yet in Champaign.

“Yes,” Underwood told College Hoops Today on Thursday when he was asked if this was the best roster — 1-10 — that he’s had since he’s been Illinois’ head coach. “We’ve had great players here like Ayo (Dosunmu) and Kofi (Cockburn), but 1-10 this is the best roster. We’ve got depth. We’ve got versatility. We’ve got skill.”

Illinois does not return a double figure scorer from last season’s team that went 23-10 and earned a four seed in the NCAA Tournament, but is one of the most intriguing teams in the sport. Three players who had roles on last year’s team — Coleman Hawkins, RJ Melendez, and Luke Goode — are back while Underwood added three impact transfers — Terrence Shannon Jr. (Texas Tech), Dain Dainja (Baylor), and Matthew Mayer (Baylor) — as well as four freshmen in Skyy Clark, Jayden Epps, Ty Rodgers, and Sencire Harris.

Underwood is exceptionally bullish on the 6-6 Rodgers.

“He’s been exceptional,” Underwood said of Rodgers. “He’s got great positional size, especially if he plays point guard for us at times, which he can do. He’s going to be an impact guy.”

Underwood also added that Epps has led the team in scoring in practice a few times and Clark is “getting better every day”. He also feels that Mayer is better than he initially thought and Goode — who shot 37.2 percent from three-point range a year ago as a freshman — is always the best shooter in the gym.

What will all of this mean when the season begins on Nov. 7th?

Nobody knows for sure.

“I’m going back to my days as a junior college coach in terms of putting this team together,” Underwood said. “We’re going to be a different team as the season progresses because we haven’t been together before. We’ve seen that already — we’re a much different team now than we were the first day of practice. Last year — I knew what we had. This year, we’re figuring it out. But we’ve got versatility. We’ve got shooting. We’ve got a lot of really good players.”

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