It Doesn't Matter Who We're Playing Tonight

We're going to start this preview off by letting you know right off the bat that I'm not going to be watching tonight's game against Dartmouth. Not because I have prior plans, but because I don't feel like paying another $10 to watch a game against a bad team on a feed that might work around 30% of the time if I'm lucky.

I'm taking a damn stand.

However, we will have a GameThread up though I'm pretty confident it'll be one of the quieter GameThreads we'll all see this season.

But, yeah, as for the game itself, I could go in depth and break down this Dartmouth team for you. I could tell you how they've actually been a decent shooting team that is good on the defensive glass, isn't very athletic and mostly plays man defense. But it'd be pointless.

Listen, Dartmouth doesn't matter in this game. If you're a Dartmouth fan who happened on this and just read that, deal with it. All that matters tonight is the Illini and how they play, because that's the only thing that will determine whether or not this is the blowout win that it should be, or if it'll be an actual game.

I know I'm really hoping for a blowout. A blowout along the lines of what we saw against Auburn on Sunday, as Auburn isn't ranked all that much higher than Dartmouth by KenPom. The reason for this is because we just don't seem to blow out the teams we should be blowing out, especially at home.

Through our first nine games I'd say we've played six teams ranked 196th or worse by KenPom. Now, we're 6-0 in those games and winning by an average of 18.6 points per game, but we're really not playing well in any of those games save for Auburn. We have an annoying tendency of letting these teams hang around simply because we struggle to score.

Now, I know that we're not going to shoot like we shot against Auburn every game. It'd impossible. But I'd like to see us manage at least an eFG% of over 50 in this game. You know how many games we've finished with an eFG% of more than 50%? Only four. That's not good when you consider the level of teams that we've played so far this season.

So tonight I hope to read along on Twitter about how the Illini are blowing the Big Green right the hell out. Just because they should, and because Big Green is a dumb fucking name.

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