Bilas Comps Wagler to Haliburton

ESPN's Jay Bilas sets up the Final Four by giving Illinois coach Brad Underwood his full respect, and delivers a Tyrese Haliburton comp that is going to travel.

Bilas tells Rich that Illinois will not be a happy to be there team. Underwood embraces the tough stuff in a no excuse fashion. This is a coach with junior college roots, who used to drive his team around in a van and mop the floors himself. Now he is flying charter, which Iowa's Ben McCollum calls bougie. Bilas laughs about McCollum starting to enjoy some of the bougie things, but the point on Underwood is that the grit is real.

Illinois, Bilas says, might have the best offense in the Final Four. Beautiful motion, really skilled players, strong international recruiting pipeline, the same pipeline Tommy Lloyd has built at Arizona. And the defense, which was not there early in the year, has taken a real leap over the last month. Andre Stojaković, who Bilas thought was the team's best player to start the season, is now coming off the bench averaging seventeen in the tournament on over sixty percent shooting. He gets downhill. He creates.

Then the headline. Keaton Wagler is the revelation of the season. Bilas had never heard of him in high school. He grew up in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. The find goes to Brad Underwood's son Tyler, who is on the staff. Tyler was scouting another player, saw Wagler, and flagged him. Bilas says the MVP of the Illinois staff is not Brad, it is Tyler. Then he goes there. Keaton Wagler, Bilas says, is Tyrese Haliburton. That is how good he is. Rich raises an eyebrow at the praise.

The conversation pans out to the bracket itself. Final Four of Big Ten, Big East, Big 12 schools. Bilas does not commit to Arizona versus UConn at the end. He favored Iowa State but they lost Joshua Jefferson to injury, and without him they could not get past Tennessee. You cannot pull a national player of the year candidate off any of these teams and expect them to reach the Final Four.

Bilas says he did not think all four number one seeds would make it again. That is an extraordinary happening in any year. Iowa beating Florida was not on his sheet, but the broader tumult is what he expected. Six or seven buzzer beaters in the bracket is another data point. No St. Peter's run to the Elite Eight this time, but those do not come every year. He calls it an extraordinary tournament, and he cannot believe the Final Four is not going to be equally extraordinary.

Clean read of the bracket. Two real name drops to file away, Keaton Wagler and Tyler Underwood.