Perfection or bust

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – For Bruce Weber, part of the challenge now is to simply enjoy it.

But to see the Illinois coach stand outside the visiting locker room of Michigan's Crisler Arena trying to savor what should be savory – a come-from-behind 57-51 conference road win in which his team wasn't at its best – is to see where this is a challenge.

Illinois is 24-0. The perfect record means the team has opponents beyond just Wisconsin (Saturday) or Penn State (Wednesday). The Illini are challenging history, hysteria and the Hoosiers (the 1976 Indiana team that last ran the table in college hoops).

Now everyone wants to know not if Illinois can win the next one, but if it can win them all. Now even the slightest blip – such as letting an underachieving Michigan team take a second-half lead – is cause for concern.

"I talked to [Michigan State coach] Tom Izzo last week, and he was talking about their championship teams," said Weber. "He said people would go crazy when it was a close game. And he said, 'Hey, some of them are going to be close. You can't be perfect.'"

Easier said than remembered when you have writers and pundits widely predicting nothing less than a perfect 39-0 national championship season. Or, heck, even worse.

"Anything less than perfection," wrote one columnist, "and Illinois will have underachieved."

So if the Illini stumble against, say, Iowa next weekend, then finish 38-1 and capture the school's first national title, they will go down as underachievers?

These are the expectations Weber has to deal with.

Weber has coached college basketball for 26 years, the last two as Illinois head coach, so he knows there is nothing to do but laugh off that kind of foolishness.

He also knows he could coach for another 26 before he has another run like this.

Even so, he'd rather not even discuss a perfect season.

"We said when we are 13-0 in the Big Ten, we'll talk about [a perfect season]," said Weber, whose team is currently 10-0 in league play. "[The media] asks about it and the kids will answer questions, but it is not brought up in our locker room.

"We're thinking about Wisconsin."

There are multiple reasons Illinois is expected to make a run at perfection. First is talent, what with three future pros in the backcourt. The Illini have so much balance that four different players have been named Big Ten Player of the Week – and Deron Williams, arguably their best player, isn't even one of them.

Second is the relative weakness of the Big Ten. Michigan State and Wisconsin are the only other ranked teams and neither looks like a Final Four contender.

The third is the chief reason – this is one smart team. It is easy to get mesmerized by the speed and flash of Dee Brown, Luther Head and Williams, but these guys not only know how to play, they know how to win.

The Illini record assists on a stunning 65.9 percent of their baskets. They run Weber's motion offense – the same one they initially balked at last year – with aplomb. They can beat you with knockout punches (they average better than 50 percent shooting in the first half), late pushes (they ended Wisconsin's 38-game home win streak by scoring 14 of the game's last 15 points) or with some late-game, on-the-fly adjustments.

Take this past Tuesday, when an overmatched Michigan team tried to take the air out of the ball and lull Illinois to sleep. It worked to the tune of a Wolverine lead with eight minutes to play.

But Weber switched defenses, Brown made three steals in four possessions and that was just about that.

"[Our guys] adjust within games, take coaching within games," said Weber. "All have become better students of the game."

As kids they read all the press clippings and listen to the commentary. As students of the game, they know better than to get caught up in the unbeaten talk, the underachieving talk, even the a-loss-now-would-be-better talk.

"I'm just blown away [people say] you have to lose to learn a lesson," said Brown. "We learned a lesson tonight."

Hopefully that lesson was to savor every single moment, every single victory, every single triumph.

Because after 24 consecutive wins, in the midst of a dream winter, it shouldn't be about what's next or what's possible, but simply what's now.