Doogie's Thoughts

(David Banks-USA TODAY Sports)

As we head into February, the college hoops season is heating up and arguably the best conference in college basketball has 5 teams all within a game of 1st. The Big Ten has 5 teams ranked inside the top 18 in this week’s AP Top 25, which leads all conferences.

The two teams tied atop of the conference just happen to be border state rivals in #18 Illinois and #11 Wisconsin. Those two teams are meeting up Wednesday night at the State Farm Center in Champaign.

Illinois is starting their most difficult stretch of the season against Wisconsin with the games that follow are at two of the toughest arenas to play at in the conference, which @ (RV) Indiana and @ #4 Purdue. The Illini gets to take a breather against Northwestern at home which should be a win but no cupcake as they’ve won at #13 Michigan State and have had 4 single-digit losses to ranked teams (Michigan State, Ohio State, Wisconsin and Illinois). Continuing that stretch, Illinois has to go to Rutgers, who is a dangerous team when playing at the RAC in Piscataway. They head up to East Lansing to face #13 Michigan State and return home to face #16 Ohio State so the Fighting Illini have a tough task to face if they want to win the Big Ten regular season title this year.

Compared to the Illini who have 5 ranked teams remaining on their schedule, the other 4 teams that are within a game of first place have less than the Illini. Illinois should get Andre Curbelo this week and has welcomed back All-American Kofi Cockburn as well. The glue of the team though is Trent Frazier, a 5th year senior who has been rock solid through all 5 years of Brad Underwood’s tenure at Illinois. A major boost and personally, my transfer of the year in the conference is Alfonso Plummer coming to Illinois from Utah and is now averaging 16 points per game. His presence with Curbelo out in the backcourt has been a major key in keeping Illinois in contention without their starting point guard. Plummer shoots almost 8 3’s per game and is shooting almost 42% from deep. Jacob Grandison is also shooting 42% from deep as well. Illini fans are about to go into a thick stretch of games and find out if their team can be an NCAA Title contender or not now that they’ll be at full strength with Curbelo and Cockburn back in the lineup.