Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Illinois' Season Opener

Don’t look now, Illinois basketball fans, but the Illini are not ranked in either preseason Top 25. Illinois picked up a measly 31 votes in the AP poll, which is exactly 100 fewer than Southern Illinois, and 52 votes in the coaches’ poll.

The good news is that Illinois opens Nov. 13 with Austin Peay and doesn’t have anything that will resemble a challenge until Game 6 against Miami of Ohio.

As for the opener, Austin Peay is the architect of one of the biggest embarrassments in Illinois history. Longtime Illinois fans (read: old people like me) will remember that the 14-seed Governors upset the 3-seed Illini in the first round of the 1987 NCAA tournament, 68-67.

Illinois got a small measure of revenge early in the next season, steam-rollering the Governors 100-62. Those are the only two games Illinois and Austin Peay have played. And since a fair number of current players probably weren’t even born yet in 1987, and certainly all of them weren’t old enough to be paying attention (poor things missed the whole Raising Arizona phenomenon entirely), I don’t see much bad blood in this meeting. Just a 35-point Illinois win.

Austin Peay, of course, is also the architect of one of the greatest crowd chants in organized sporting history. In the early 1970s Austin Peay had an All-America named James Williams, nicknamed “the Fly”. In reference to this particular player, Governors fans would chant “The Fly is open – Let’s Go Peay!” And that never stops being funny to me.