Illinois
The Final Four is set with UConn stunning Duke to join Illinois, Arizona and Michigan
UConn guard Braylon Mullins, right, celebrates his game winning basket with guard Malachi Smith (0) during the second half in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament against Duke, Sunday, March 29, 2026, in Washington.
Stephanie Scarbrough/AP
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Stephanie Scarbrough/AP
All that talent at Arizona and Michigan. All that momentum and good vibes at UConn. And somebody has to be play the part of the unheralded “little guy.” At the Final Four next weekend, that role belongs, improbably, to Illinois.
In a sign of the times, the Illinii — a Big Ten team with more wins in the conference over the last seven seasons than any other program — will pass for something resembling Cinderella when college basketball’s biggest party kicks off in Indianapolis on Saturday.
The first challenge for coach Brad Underwood’s team will be stopping a hard-charging UConn juggernaut that came from 19 points down and got a game-winner from the logo with 0.4 seconds left from an Indy native — Braylon Mullins — to make its third Final Four in the last four years.
The last two times the Huskies reached this point, they won the championship.
“It’s a UConn culture, a UConn heart,” coach Dan Hurley said. “We believe we’re supposed to win this time of year.”
All these teams do.
Arizona, led by Brayden Burries, and Michigan, with Yaxel Lendeborg, have up to nine NBA prospects between them.
The Wildcats opened as slight favorites — at plus-165 to win the championship, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. That was a shade ahead of the Wolverines, who are plus-180 after their 95-62 romp over Tennessee on Sunday.
But, in one of a few strange twists on the odds chart, the Wildcats are 1 1/2-point underdogs to Michigan in Saturday night’s second semifinal.
Illinois is a 2 1/2-point favorite over UConn and, in reality, it’s the Huskies, at plus-550, who are the biggest long shot in Indy.
Even so, the fact that Illinois — the flagship university in the nation’s sixth most populous state and a school with an enrollment of nearly 60,000 — feels most like this year’s out-of-nowhere underdog speaks more about the current state of college hoops than the Illini themselves.
They are a No. 3 seed — the highest number at the Final Four in two years. (UConn is a 2. Last season, all four No. 1s made it.)
This year’s meeting of 1 vs. 1 — Michigan vs. Arizona — is a heavyweight matchup of power teams from power conferences meeting with everything at stake.
It’s a far cry from a mere three years ago, when mid-majors Florida Atlantic (coached by Dusty May, who now leads the Wolverines) and San Diego State crashed college basketball’s biggest party.
Since then, NIL and the transfer portal have redefined the contours of player movement, another spasm of realignment has made the big conferences bigger (Arizona, now in the Big 12, was in the Pac-12 in 2023), and the high-achieving underdogs that used to make March Madness what it is have gone into a slump.
Double-digit seeds won a total of five games in this tournament (not counting the play-in round). Two years ago, they won 11 and sent one team (N.C. State) to the Final Four.
Not surprisingly, Underwood — the coach who landed on the Illinois radar a decade ago by coaching double-digit seed Stephen F. Austin to a pair of upset wins in the tournament — views his program’s trip to the Final Four more as destiny than a once-in-a-lifetime story.
It is, however, the first trip for Illinois since 2005, when it lost to North Carolina in the title game.
Illinois coach Brad Underwood celebrates after Illinois beat Iowa in an Elite Eight game in the NCAA college basketball tournament Saturday, March 28, 2026, in Houston.
Ashley Landis/AP
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Ashley Landis/AP
“I don’t want to sound arrogant,” said Underwood, whose teams have won 96 Big Ten games since 2019-20, two more than Purdue. “I’ve never doubted us getting to a Final Four would happen. I have thought we have had other teams capable. But I also know how doggone hard it is to do it.”
The Big Ten knows all about this. Both Illinois and Michigan have a chance to deliver a title for the conference for the first time since Michigan State won it all in 2000.
Illinois vs. UConn
The Illini, led by the so-called “Balkan Bloc” — a cohort of players with roots in Eastern Europe — have a potential NBA lottery pick of their own in guard Keaton Wagler.
Even so, the best-known name on the Illini roster might be Andrej Stojakovic, whose father, Peja, was a three-time NBA All-Star. Illinois is the third school in three years for the younger Stojakovic, who spent one season at Stanford and another at Cal before joining Underwood’s crew.
The task for Illinois: Figuring out who to key on across a roster that has five players who average double figures, led by Tarris Reed Jr.
Michigan vs. Arizona
Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg (23) celebrates after defeating Tennessee in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 29, 2026, in Chicago.
Erin Hooley/AP
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Erin Hooley/AP
The Wildcats-Wolverines game is a high-powered matchup of programs that have shown there’s more than one way to amass talent in the era of the unlimited transfer portal and big-money name, image and likeness deals.
Four of the five starters for Tommy Lloyd’s Wildcats began their careers in Tucson; the fifth, Big 12 player of the year Jaden Bradley, moved over from Alabama and has been with the Wildcats for three years.
Meanwhile, the top four players in minutes played at Michigan — Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr., Aday Mara and Elliot Cadeau — all arrived from the transfer portal.
In a twist that makes perfect sense these days, both coaches parlayed roots in the mid-majors to a spot on the sport’s biggest stage. Lloyd spent decades as a top assistant for Mark Few at Gonzaga before heading to Arizona to rebuild the program after the ouster of Sean Miller in 2021.
May led FAU to the Final Four before heading to the Michigan program that had thrived, then collapsed, under former Fab Five star Juwan Howard.
Illinois
Thousands of birds could migrate over the Chicago area this week, and here’s how to protect them
Thousands upon thousands of birds are expected to cross over Illinois as part of their spring migrations in coming days.
Thursday night saw the highest migration totals of the season so far, but researchers at Cornell believe that Sunday and Monday nights could see even more avian traffic in the skies over the Chicago area, with hundreds of thousands of birds expected to traverse the area.
According to estimates from Birdcast, Sunday night and into Monday morning there could be “medium” activity for migrating birds, with thousands of birds per kilometer flying over the area.
Even more birds are expected to take flight Monday night and into Tuesday morning thanks to favorable weather conditions, with a “high” number of birds expected to take to the skies over the Chicago area.
According to estimates, up to 383 million birds could be in flight over the central United States during the peak of the migration overnight.
On Thursday night the Chicago area experienced its busiest night of the spring migration season so far, with more than 367,000 birds having been estimated to have passed over Cook County alone.
In all, more than 23,000,000 birds are believed to have crossed the state of Illinois so far during the spring migration.
Among the primary birds expected to be flying through the area are American Redstarts, Magnolia Warblers, Baltimore Orioles and Indigo Buntings, according to researchers at the CornellLab.
As millions of birds continue visiting the Chicago area, here are some steps that residents can take to keep them safe.
When do birds typically migrate?
Peak migration for birds over the state of Illinois occurs in mid-to-late May, with hundreds of different species heading north for the summer breeding season.
Those migration flights for songbirds and other species typically take place in the overnight hours. According to experts, birds typically take flight 30-to-45 minutes after sunset, with the greatest number of birds in flight typically seen approximately two-to-three hours later.
When should residents turn lights off?
One of the best ways to help protect birds is to turn off lights during peak migration times.
According to Birdcast, the best time to turn off or dim exterior lights and interior lights is between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., when most birds are active.
Bright lights can disorient and attract birds, making them vulnerable to collisions and to predators on the ground, according to the website.
Hundreds of millions of birds are killed each year in collisions with buildings, and residents and businesses are being asked to do their part to keep the creatures safe.
In addition to turning off unneeded exterior lights, residents and businesses are also asked to dim or turn off lights in lobbies, and to draw blinds to help keep light from escaping through windows.
Finally, exterior lights should be aimed downward and be well-shielded so that birds aren’t attracted to them.
Are there other steps?
Another key step in protecting birds is to bring pet cats inside during overnight hours.
According to the American Bird Conservancy, cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds in the United States every year, and during migration season those impacts can be even more devastating, as exhausted birds typically seek refuge in plants and trees to rest on their journeys, making them vulnerable to attack.
Since cats like to hunt at night, active migrating birds can be a target, leading to experts asking residents to keep animals inside when possible.
Police are investigating after a motorcyclist was killed in a crash in suburban Oswego on Saturday afternoon.
Officers responded to the 4000 block of Route 34 near Wolf Road for the crash around 1:42 p.m. The motorcyclist was unconscious and was receiving CPR when officers arrived.
They took over medical care until paramedics arrived and took the victim, identified as a 20-year-old man, to a local hospital, where he later died from his injuries.
The victim’s identity is being withheld pending an autopsy scheduled for Monday, police said.
Initial reports say the victim was traveling eastbound on Route 34 when he hit an enclosed trailer being towed by a van. According to the police, the van was also traveling eastbound and was attempting to make a right turn into a driveway when the crash occurred.
The driver and passenger in the van were not hurt, police said.
Route 34 was closed between Wolf Road and Boulder Hill Pass for four hours for crash reconstruction.
The crash remains under investigation pending completion of the traffic crash reconstruction report.
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