Listen to this place. Listen to the sheer power of 16,618 screaming people in the grip of true belief.
If you could somehow harness the energy from all the hoarse power at Assembly Hall, you would be able to light several central Illinois towns and have enough juice left over to start up a few electric butter churns in the area.
It’s an amazing phenomenon, given the fact that, as of 2 1/2 weeks ago, Bruce Weber allegedly didn’t know his head from his bounce pass.
But here is Illinois, running and defending and majoring in three-pointers Tuesday night against a Michigan State team that three days before couldn’t seem to miss a basket. The Illini are up by 15 points at halftime, by as many as 28 in the second half and by 24 by the time they mercifully tuck in the Spartans for the night.
So what does a 75-51 victory make the coach? An accidental tourist? A caretaker? A hood ornament? There’s an actual possibility Weber might get some credit before the season is over but don’t count on it.
The question is, Where are they now? Where are all the people who had wanted Weber’s head on a platter several weeks ago? Either they’re not here or they’re hiding their guillotines under some very bulky overcoats. Or, could it be that the breeze has shifted inside Assembly Hall and all the windsocks are blowing in the other direction now? Yeah, it could very well be that.
My, how those frowns have turned upside down. It’s the strangest thing. Weber was the problem with the Illinois basketball team. The Illini had dropped three of their previous five games, including a 20-point loss to Wisconsin on Jan. 24.
Alums and interested farmers had reacted to that loss with varying levels of apoplexy.
“We were all on different pages,” guard Luther Head admitted Tuesday.
But now all is good, page-wise, especially after a quality victory over the Spartans. Illinois is tied with Michigan State for second place in the Big Ten, percentage points behind Wisconsin. Now there are a few votes for Weber being part of the solution. Somehow, somewhere he got an injection of brain cells.
“I don’t pay attention to it,” Weber said. “I don’t get the papers. I don’t get on the Internet. I don’t watch the news. I don’t listen to talk radio. Other than when you guys tell me about it, I don’t hear about it.
“I did appreciate Wisconsin losing to Northwestern, not only for us in the race, but also now I’m not the worst coach in the country. Bo [Ryan’s] tied with me as the worst coach.”
The same people who were down on Weber probably are thinking No. 1 NCAA tournament seed right now.
Let’s see if we can level the mood swings a bit. This is a fine team. It’s also a young team. Somehow, people got it inside their brainpans that this would be a dominant team. It isn’t, not yet, even if it looked that way Tuesday night.
Illinois’ roster features one bona fide star, Deron Williams. Dee Brown is more of an athlete than a basketball player, meaning he provides bursts of energy on fast breaks but is caged when it becomes a half-court game. He doesn’t have the skills of a point guard and he doesn’t shoot well enough to be a shooting guard. If I’m the coach of Illinois’ track team, I introduce him to the wonders of the 100-meter dash.
If Head can stay out of off-court trouble and shoot like he did Tuesday night (5 of 12 on three-pointers), maybe this team will go from a fine team to a very good team.
Look, part of the earlier difficulties for Weber had to do with not being, of all people, Bill Self. Anger over the way Self left for Kansas somehow had given way to an almost romantic view of the departed coach. People wistfully wondered how old Bill would have handled this press or that matchup zone.
Old Bill has his own problems, having watched Oklahoma State torch his team by 20 Monday night.
“Bruce deserves a lot of credit,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said. “It’s not easy coming in [from another program].”
So a young Illinois team took another step in the search to find itself Tuesday night, and this is what it found: It found that it could stop a team that had shot 73.3 percent Saturday at Ohio State.
It found that maybe its coach can coach a little bit. Weber already has gone through two or three image makeovers, even if he hasn’t changed a bit.
