Good Morning, Illini Nation: Mid-summer bracketology update

Welcome to “Good Morning, Illini Nation,” your daily dose of college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Scott Richey. He’ll offer up insights every morning on Brad Underwood’s team and college basketball at large:

We're inside 100 days until the first games of the 2024-25 college basketball season. The NCAA tournament? That's a little further away. Selection Sunday is March 16, and the First Four tips off two days later.

But there's never not a good time to talk about bracketology. Even months away from basketball being played and even more from it being particularly relevant to where teams might fall on various seed lines.

The latest from ESPN's Joe Lunardi has Illinois as a No. 7 seed playing in Milwaukee in the first round (a boon for Illini fans) against Miami (an opportunity for a little revenge from the 2012 tournament).

Illinois is one of 10 Big Ten teams in Lunardi's 2025 NCAA tournament field. A group that includes Rutgers, Oregon and Maryland on the right side of the bubble plus Michigan, Indiana, Michigan State, Purdue, UCLA and Ohio State. He's super high on the Big Ten if you consider he has Nebraska among his First Four Out and then USC, Iowa and Wisconsin in the Next Four Out.

All told, that's 14 of the league's now 18 teams. Sorry, Northwestern, Minnesota, Penn State and Washington.

Should Illinois find itself in the NCAA tournament in 7 1/2 months, it would mark five straight appearances for the Illini under Brad Underwood. And I'd give Underwood six considering the 2019-20 team was in before the tournament was wiped out by the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, five is the longest streak for a single Illinois coach since Lou Henson's eight straight from 1983-90.