O’Donnell: Fighting Illini unlikely to ever win a national crown with Underwood
THE WEEKEND CAME IN with the Orange Krush rising.
It peeled out with a Final Four participation ribbon.
The harshest reality for those deserving and devoted is that Brad Underwood took a Champaign jam just about as far as he ever will.
The college game's ecosystem that was in place when the Illini influential hired their sideline pitbull nine years ago has changed.
Player acquisition is no longer any great mystery pursuit.
WHAT MADE UNDERWOOD CLAWING EDGE in 2017 is now evolving open procedure at all power schools inclined to go all-in during the era of NIL money and the transfer portal.
Showdown games come down to matchups, payroll and X's and O's.
Illinois might actually have had an edge in across-the-board mano-a-manos vs. UConn Saturday night.
But when it came to strategies at critical junctures, Danny Hurley and the Huskies were better schooled. For all of his madman animation, Hurley unfailingly presented a superior clipboard.
UNLIKE TOMMY LLOYD AND ARIZONA in the late semifinal against Michigan, Underwood's Illini didn't embarrass themselves.
But they got beat. Defeated by a sharper game coach, an outfit with more NCAA Tournament seasoning and a Point North for all that Illinois men's basketball would love to be.
The Illinois Class of '26 was an engaging group to watch. They lacked the artistry and intensity of Bruce Weber's 2005 national runners-up. But they held their nation's interest to the bitter orange participation flag in Indianapolis.
AS LONG AS BOOSTER FUNDING HOLDS UP, the future of Illini basketball under Brad Underwood should be competitive Big Ten seasons, multiple-weekend NCAA Tourney runs and perhaps even another Final Four or two.
But a national championship?
It would take a mystic parting of an ill-charmed Orange Sea to get them to that promised land.
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WITHOUT QUESTION THE MOST EVOCATIVE GAME of the long championship weekend was UCLA's stunning 79-51 beatdown of South Carolina for the NCAA women's title Sunday afternoon.
Despite a 36-1 mark entering the game, the Bruins were 4½-point underdogs. Within five playing minutes of the start, that line seemed upside down.
THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP WAS the first for the UCLA women since 1978, when Ann Meyers led the Bruins to the top of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The AIAW was an oversight agency formed in 1941 that gave way to the NCAA in 1983.
Meyers — now an unfathomable age 70 — was at the game. She's the widow of Don Drysdale, the Baseball Hall of Famer and former White Sox play-by-play man. He died suddenly of a heart attack, age 56, while on a road trip as a Dodgers broadcaster at Montreal in July 1993.
(Chicago back fact: When the championship Bulls were unsuccessfully straining to regain broadcast buoyancy after the unthinkable 1991 disconnect with Jim Durham, Meyers-Drysdale was offered an on-air job. She declined, officially due to “family reasons.”)
EXTENDING THE UCLA LINKS to history Sunday was that coach Cori Close forged an ongoing relationship with the mythic John Wooden after she took the top slot at Pauley Pavilion in 2011.
As recounted by ABC'S Holly Rowe, Wooden began monitoring Close's progress because of her classic coaching principles and because she shared a first name with one of his great-granddaughters.
The Close-Wooden association centered on Tuesday visits until his death at age 99 in 2020.
That'd be a great title for a book if Detroit-based Mitch Albom hadn't already scored so big with the heavily Oprah-promoted 1997 memoir “Tuesdays with Morrie,” about his life lessons from a dying college professor.
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ON COURT, THE ROMP OF THE BRUINS was fueled in part by the energizing efforts of Angela Dugalic, a former Ms. Basketball in Illinois from powerful Maine West High School in Des Plaines.
Dugalic's presence was most important later in the first quarter when UCLA was trying to sustain its opening flurry while super 6-foot-7 center Lauren Betts was forced to the bench “with something in her throat.”
With Dugalic and ace guard Gabriela Jaquez sustaining the overdrive, the Bruins led 21-10 after the first quarter and 36-23 at the half of the surprising “no contest.”
THE ALL-SENIOR TRIO OF BETTS, JAQUEZ AND DUGALIC were golden heirs for the victors.
Jaquez is the younger sister of Jaime Jaquez Jr., a former UCLA star who now plays for the middle-class Miami Heat.
Dugalic led Maine West to an IHSA Class 4A title in 2019 (35-0) and later played one season at Oregon and also for the Serbian national team.
HER HEAD COACH IN DES PLAINES WAS Kim de Marigny, who succeeded Derril Kipp for five seasons after his sad passing from pancreatic cancer in July 2016.
While Kipp's 35-year, 788-316 record towers over hoops at Oakton and Wolf Roads — and de Marigny's 137-30 is in lockstep — deepest Maine West historians have never forgotten the critical foundational efforts of the late Gene Zuccarini.
Zuccarini got the program off to a great start, peaking with a 23-3 mark in 1980-81 before administrative sticklers forced him to continue as only either girls basketball or boys golf coach.
THE POPULAR ZUCCARINI grudgingly chose golf.
That decision brought about the Kipp-de Marigny eras, a legacied lineage that Dugalic hustled to the mountain top of women's collegiate basketball Sunday.
Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.