Indiana Basketball: Fighting Illini Rivalry

As Big Ten play starts in full swing, we will dive into each rivalry for Indiana Basketball.

We begin our rivalry series with the Illinois Fighting Illini. We began our series in 1906. The Fighting Illini won that first epic battle against Indiana Basketball 27-24. Ever since we have lead the way in this historic rivalry that will be renewed on January 3rd, 2019 at Assembly Hall. For awhile we shared the same name for our basketball arena. Our last contest ended in an Indiana victory 78-68.

Since that first game in 1906 the Indiana Hoosiers have won an outstanding 91 games and have lost 87. We share a border and recruiting stomping grounds. In our minds Illinois Basketball typically receives our leftovers. The players we didn’t find worthy enough to don our historic Crimson and Cream. We usually don’t meet up in the conference tournament but nonetheless the Illini lead that series 6-2.

With our upcoming game we wanted to shed a little light on our historic journey with the Illini and hopefully we get to add another epic win to our overall success against them. In order to do that we really must focus on our turnovers. We can’t play sloppy and walk out of Assembly Hall with a victory. This is Big Ten territory now. We have to treat this game and each one that follows as a tournament game.

We have to add this team that has Romeo Langford, Robert Phinisee, Al Durham and Juwan Morgan to the list of victorious players that found a way to knock off our bitter basketball rivals. Maybe we can win by a mile for a third straight week. We know one thing, we will need to play complete team basketball to get this win.

Speaking of our current players our next article will focus on how freshman Romeo Langford has improved and what we expect going forward.