Tom Fornelli

speaker

217 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Tom Fornelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Eye On College Basketball · Summer Shootaround: Frenemy of the pod Tom Fornelli stops by to discuss Illinois’ case as the best team in CBB 🟠🔵 · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

I really enjoy getting my skull caved in by UConn.

Hey, Danny, you want to play again in November or December, whatever it is that we're going?

It's been tough for the most part.

There was a long, dry desert from the end of the Bruce Weber era until the start of the Underwood era.

And even the first year or two under Underwood weren't exactly roses and flowers.

He inherited a program that was in rough shape.

And for me, even before I ended up going to Illinois, the era that I grew up in, Illinois was not winning national titles.

They were not going to the Final Four every year.

But they were one of the better programs in the Big Ten.

And they had typically been, under Lon Krueger and then into the Bill Self era, one of the better teams in the country.

So I kind of grew up accustomed to the basketball program being good.

And Illinois is, quote unquote, a basketball school.

So then when you had a good decade of just bad to mediocre results, it was tough.

I never went away, but it was not nearly as enjoyable as it had been for a while.

Underwood comes in and now he's clearly he's got the program humming and it's starting to feel again like you did in those Kruger and self in the early Weber years to where it's like going into every single season.

Like you're like, hey, we can win the Big Ten.

We can not only get to the tournament, we can make a deep run.

And I think that's where Illinois belongs, because I do think that when you look at the tradition of the Big Ten, you look at the tradition in the history of the school and you look at the talent that has just been in Illinois and in the Chicago area and the Peoria area, Illinois has long feasted on for the program.

it's ridiculous for them not to be one of the top programs in the country.

Like sweet 16s should be a far more regular occurrence with this program than they have been for the last 20 years.

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