CHAMPAIGN — Brad Underwood hasn’t been scheduling his Illinois men’s basketball team out more than a week at a time since most of the Illini players returned to campus in June.

There wasn’t, not to put too fine a point on things, much reason to think all that far into the future about concrete plans.

The ever-evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic essentially necessitated a flexible approach. That there wasn’t a clear picture on how the 2020-21 season might play out reinforced the need to stay fluid with any planning.

While the former hasn’t changed, the NCAA’s announcement on Wednesday evening of a revised start date for the 2020-21 season for Nov. 25 — in addition to a handful of other notable details — at least laid the groundwork for Underwood and the other 356 Division I coaches.

“There’s an ability to put a plan together, and we can do that knowing when the start of the season is,” Underwood said Wednesday before the official start date was known, while noting this particular preseason has certainly been different.

“We’ve always had everything mapped out for what our preseason would look like for five or six weeks and what we wanted to do on each of those days,” Underwood continued. “We kept everything in very small groups so we didn’t have mass quarantines if those situations arose. It’s been very different — there’s no doubt about that — and yet our guys have adapted great and our coaches have adapted great.”

Underwood and his coaching staff now know they can begin official practices on Oct. 14. That gives all teams 42 days to work in 30 practices in advance of the season’s opening start date, which comes a day before Thanksgiving.

The official practices will put teams back at 20 hours per week with the coaches and will follow a transitional period between Sept. 21 and Oct. 13 of 12 hours per week of strength and conditioning activities, meetings and skill instruction.

“It gives us hope that we are going to play,” Illinois assistant coach Chin Coleman said. “With some hard dates coming from the NCAA, we’re going to get excited and giddy, man. We’re going to turn this thing up and get after it.”

What’s still to be determined, though, is scheduling. Scrimmages and exhibitions are out. The maximum number of games was also cut by four with the season starting 15 days later than originally scheduled. Teams can schedule 24 games and participate in a multi-team event that includes up to three games or schedule 25 games and appear in a multi-team event with two games or simply schedule just 25 games.

Illinois’ original 2020-21 schedule was shaping up to be a doozy. Plenty of high-profile matchups on top of a 20-game Big Ten slate. The type of schedule a potential top-10 team in the country should play.

That schedule, of course, is moot. Nonconference games aren’t a guarantee, although the NCAA recommendation is to play at least four, and there’s no telling for now who Illinois will play or when or where.

Those recommended nonconference games are part of the NCAA’s plan toward filling out the NCAA tournament field. The necessary qualifications for it have also changed. Teams will be eligible to be selected as long as they play a minimum of 13 games against Division I opponents.

The NCAA tournament, of course, is where this particular Illinois team has set its sights after being denied the opportunity this past March when the pandemic shut down the entirety of the sports world. The Illini were considered a tournament lock, which would have been the program’s first appearance since the 2012-13 season.

“Now we can start to really chisel away at becoming a national championship team,” Coleman said. “That’s our goal. Our goal is to be a Big Ten champion and national champion. Now we see that in the future of being possible. For us to get some hard dates here, we can see those things and we can start to plan the process of building our team to doing something very special that hasn’t been done around here in a long time. We think that we have a team that’s capable.”

Scott Richey is a reporter covering college basketball at The News-Gazette. His email is srichey@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@srrichey).