Monday's news and opinions ...

--Spoke with former Illini Tauja Catchings last week for a tidbit in the debut issue of IlliniHQ Magazine. Catchings, who made her Big Ten Network studio debut during the Purdue-Georgetown game Nov. 22, will be in the studio for Wednesday's BTN telecast of Illinois-Marquette.

Catchings said her work this season for BTN will be of the studio variety.

"I'm just filling in for Stephanie White and Vera Jones when they're not able to be in the studio," Catchings said from Indianapolis, taking a break from fixing dinner for her 4-year-old son, Kanon. "It's a great opportunity. Next year I would love to get into being an analyst and doing games. But I'm just getting my foot in the door and doing studio (work)."

Catchings is busy these days. She is a real estate agent. She is the vice president of her sister Tamika's "Catch the Stars" Foundation and also works as the analyst on Chicago Sky radio broadcasts.

As an Illini, Catchings is one of the most complete players in the program's history. On the UI's career charts, she ranks 10th in scoring, fifth in rebounds, second in offensive rebounds, fifth in assists and sixth in steals. That's impressive. Off the court, she was just as important. Catchings led by example; she was as intelligent, classy and mature a player as I've covered in 12 seasons on the UI beat.

--Interesting maneuvering in the AP poll this week. Illinois now has 12 votes (six points from Paul Zeise of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; five from Stu Durando of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; and one from Debbie Antonelli, the omnipresent TV broadcaster who, strangely, calls just about every league EXCEPT the Big Ten.) More telling, perhaps, is that for the first time in her UI tenure, Jolette Law's current team has moved ahead of her former team, Rutgers, in the polls. Rutgers (5-4 heading into tonight's ESPN2 game against Florida) received one vote after losing to ... Temple, the only team that has beaten Illinois. (The one-loss Owls, by the way, received seven points. That they remain behind Illinois is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. Hello? Is anybody out there? Anyone watching?)

--ESPN HoopGurlz, the Worldwide Leader's recruiting analyst, released two-year recruiting class rankings the other day. Illinois ranked seventh in the country for the Classes of 2009 and 2010, trailing Stanford, Baylor, Maryland, Cal, Duke and Connecticut. Pretty heady stuff. (ESPN.com's Chris Hansen writes in the article that Illinois has three scholarships to give in the 2011 class. Not sure how he arrived at that number; by my count, it's two. Illinois does not have any juniors in eligibility, so the 13 players who will be on next year's roster will all be available to return for 2011-12. All of this, of course, assumes no transfers.)

--You probably noticed that Big Ten play began on Sunday with five games, most notably Indiana's upset of Michigan State and Northwestern's victory against Purdue. (By the way, don't be too surprised by the latter result. The Boilers are struggling big-time, and Northwestern is improved. In the short term, those are teams headed in opposite directions.)

Illinois, on its bye week, was the only league team that didn't play, which is just fine with Jolette Law because she is among the many Big Ten coaches who don't like the early start. It was necessitated because the conference went to 18 league games a year ago, and this was the first year in which the league couldn't cram all of its games into a post-Christmas schedule. One game had to be moved to earlier in December, and because of various final exam schedules, the league wanted to avoid the second and third weeks of December. Thus, you get an early December game.

It won't be this way for long. The league is going back to a 16-game schedule next winter, so the conference opener once again will fall between Christmas and New Year's.

--For the last couple years, the NCAA has invited a few journalists and head coaches to participate in a mock selection process for the NCAA tournament. It takes place in February, and the selection committee is on hand to educate the invitees about the process while allowing them to go through it themselves. It's a great attempt at transparency for what many folks view as a mysterious process. Here's how ESPN.com's Mechelle Voepel described the process when she took part in the inaugural mock selection in 2008.

I was thrilled to get an invitation to be a part of the process this year, and I accepted. The mock selection will take place Feb. 4-5 in Indianapolis, and we'll have an in-depth feature story on the experience in mid-February.