Green Street | Value of early season games

Welcome to "Green Street," your dose of women's college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Joe Vozzelli. He'll offer up insight on Shauna Green's Illini team and the women's game at large every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The Illinois women's basketball team is set to tip off the 2024-25 season in 29 days. The official start to the new season will happen three days earlier.

That the Illini open up their third year under coach Shauna Green with a high-profile matchup against Florida State at State Farm Center is a big deal. It could be the "best game" on the docket for Thursday, Nov. 7 as a potential AP Top 25 matchup.

In fact, there's only two other games on Nov. 7 featuring two power-conference teams with UCF (Big 12) playing host to Marquette (Big East) at 6 p.m. and Stanford (ACC) and Washington State (Pac-12) capping off the night at 9 p.m. in Stanford, Calif.

It's an interesting opening week for the new-look Big Ten, in general, with Michigan, Southern Cal and UCLA all on big stages on the opening Monday of the 2024-25 women's college basketball season. The Bruins and Trojans will both be overseas on opening day as part of the Aflac Oui-Play in Paris. UCLA will take on Louisville, while JuJu Watkins and USC will play in an early-evening game (European time, that is) in the French capital against Mississippi.

Lastly, coach Kim Barnes Arico 's Wolverines receive a huge early test against defending champion South Carolina during the Las Vegas Series at T-Mobile Arena.

But really outside of those three games — and the Illinois-FSU matchup — the opening week doesn't offer much from a Big Ten perspective. At least in terms of exciting games with the other 14 Big Ten teams playing mid- and low-major teams. Not unusual by any means.

"We've kind of had to go places to have some of those ranked teams come in," Green said last week of what it's taken to land home matchups with FSU, Marquette and Oregon State this season. "I think we have a really tough nonconference schedule, but we need that. We need that because ... every game in this league matters, and you can't drop a game you're not supposed to and you have to take care of your home games. It's just a whole other level when you get to conference play."

That's not to say the rest of the Big Ten hasn't scheduled tough in nonconference play, however.

Maryland has been the standard-bearer in that regard under veteran coach Brenda Frese , and this season is no different. The Terrapins will face Duke and Syracuse in November and potentially a top-five team in Texas on Martin Luther King Day in Newark, N.J.

"I think the biggest priority is you do want to find that balance because you've got to find those rotations in your roster, but for us we also don't — we want to be prepared when we go into conference play," Frese said. "So for us to be able to bring in as many NCAA tournament teams that we're going to face ... all those games are in preparation to really help us when we come into Big Ten play."