Illinois coach Brad Underwood goes viral for postgame fart response after Penn State loss
Just four days after Illinois knocked off No. 2 Texas, the Fighting Illini returned home to Champaign to take on Penn State. The game didn’t go well as the Nittany Lions cruised to a 74-59 win — and Brad Underwood made his thoughts quite clear after the game.
“You can tell I’m not very happy,” Underwood said on the radio after the game, via Illini Inquirer’s Jeremy Werner. “They deserve to walk around campus and be miserable during finals week.”
The ensuing press conference went about as expected. In fact, at one point, Underwood was asked about the leadership of guard Terrence Shannon Jr. and literally made a fart noise into the microphone.
“That’s what I thought of that today,” Underwood said.
Underwood had plenty of harsh words about the loss, which saw just two Illinois players reach double figures as Penn State had two players reach 20 points and shoot 50% from the field for the game. That effort — or lack thereof, as Underwood said — didn’t sit well with the coach.
During his two-minute opening statement, he emphatically called out his team for a rough week of practice.
“Inexcusable. Let’s start there,” Underwood said. “That’s not to discredit anything Penn State did. I had this one circled on the calendar since the league schedule came out, and I knew we were playing in the Jimmy V, it’s pretty easy to get excited about. I knew, I’ve known we’re going to have nights like this with an extremely young team. Second-youngest in the Power 5, I knew these nights were coming. I can live with all that, except the complete lack of leadership and the complete lack of effort that was given today. Period. From the very first play that they scored to the two practices before this game, completely unacceptable.
“The lack of leadership on this team is zero. It is none. Inexcusable. We’ll find out who wants to be a part of playing hard and doing it the right way. All the credit to Penn State. They deserved to win the game, they punched us in the mouth. They’re old … and they played like grown men. We played very, very uninspired basketball from the second we landed from Madison Square Garden until now. We have been atrocious in practice, maybe the two worst days of practice leading up to a game I’ve been a part of, and that’s leadership. That’s leadership. Plain and simple, leadership. Put it in bold damn print. Leadership, lack of, and no effort. That’s what happens in this league when you have none of that.”