Illinois Fighting Illini Offensive - Defensive Basketball Playbook

The numbers don’t lie.  Change your defense

Hey Coach,

If you think the coaches at the top of the game have blind faith in their systems, you’d be mistaken.

These guys are committed to winning, not any one dogmatic approach…

Just like you and me, it’s adapt or get overrun!

Here is a textbook case of a coach who acknowledged a problem and took very specific steps to correct it.

Head Coach Brad Underwood was not in a desirable situation…

He inherited a “rebuilding” program…(we all know what that means).

And after two dismal seasons, he was open to change.

His high-pressure defense that has worked so well in JUCO was letting him down.

It was time to adapt or die.

Here’s what he did to turn the Illini program around and build a top 25 team…

Brought in outside help (from the Celtics organization)
Studied Sweet Sixteen teams, Big Ten teams, and more
Analyzed the categories where his team ranked worst
“I looked at where we were at in all those things and knew we had to make some changes. What we were doing, there were some positives for it. But at the end of the day, change needed to happen, and we had to do that.” – Brad Underwood

The result was a complete transformation.

The good kind.

He succeeded in morphing his pressure defense into a more of a pack line defense following the detailed plan in our new playbook.

And now you can put this plan to work for you.

In fact, we’ve dedicated an entire section of this playbook to the breakdown of the pressure defense to more of the pack line defense Underwood implements today.

In total, we’ve put together 122 pages of the plays responsible for pulling a once-proud D1 team out of the dregs and into contention!

Here’s all the proof you need that defenses have and will continue to evolve.

Have you?

If you need a blueprint, this is it.

See you courtside,

Scott “always evolving” Peterman