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It was supposed to be all about the big guys when the Maryland men’s basketball team opened the Big Ten season Tuesday evening against Illinois at Xfinity Center.

It was supposed to be about how the Terps handled the length of the Fighting Illini, who rotated three large post players on a night when Maryland bigs Damonte Dodd and Michal Cekovsky were sidelined by injuries.

So the Terrapins simply proved that size doesn’t matter. Their little guys ran over, under and around an overmatched Illinois team that didn’t know what to do about Anthony Cowan, Jaylen Brantley and, of course, Melo Trimble, who combined for 24 points, five assists and seven rebounds in the first half to spark a surprisingly easy 84-59 victory.

Cekovsky is out with an ankle injury and Dodd is nursing a sprained knee, which figured to put tremendous pressure on Ivan Bender to handle 6-foot-11, 280-pound center Mike Thorne Jr. and 6-10 forward Maverick Morgan underneath.

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Instead, the Illini big men had their hands full trying to keep the Maryland guards away from the rim…or trying to keep the ball from finding Bender around the basket when they managed to force Trimble or Cowan to abandon an inside move. Meanwhile, Thorne, Morgan and 6-10 forward Michael Finke scored just nine points in the first half and 20 for the game.

Trimble dropped that many by himself, while Brantley finished with 13 off the bench and Cowan had 12 points and six assists in one of the best performances of his freshman season.

“They just never back down,” coach Mark Turgeon said. “I never want to take Anthony out, but I just do, just to get other guys in. He was terrific. I thought defensively, the first couple possessions, he was terrific. He got the ball in the paint. He’s got his floater going. He’s making the right decisions. Six assists, one turnover in 34 minutes, as much as he handles it, it’s terrific.”

While everyone marveled at the way the Terps turned the size disadvantage into an effective offensive weapon, the players said it was simply a matter of executing the game plan Turgeon designed to compensate for his team’s temporary lack of size under the basket.

“We came in and we had a great game plan,” Cowan said. “Coach Turgeon had a great game plan for us and despite having Ceko and Damonte out, we were able to come out with the win.”

Brantley played just 20 minutes, but he was the Terps‘ second leading scorer and added five rebounds and three assists. Though Turgeon said after the game that he didn’t expect such a resounding performance — under such difficult circumstances — he was not surprised by anything Brantley did at either end of the court.

“He’s been good for us for awhile,” Turgeon said. “His energy and his effort on loose balls and rebounding. He had an offensive rebound in there and threw it up with his left hand against a big kid. Jaylen’s a winner. The kid’s a winner.

“You know, you don’t want to put him in because then you’ve got Anthony who is 5-10 and you’ve got Jaylen who is 5-10 and Melo is about 6-2 and you see all their big guards, but it doesn’t seem to hurt us when I put him in. So, it’s comforting, and he just keeps playing hard, but he does it every day in practice.”

Maybe Turgeon was telling the truth when he said he didn’t foresee his smaller team so completely nullifying the Illinois height, but he apparently convinced his guards before the game that they weren’t the ones at a disadvantage.

“Coach just told us that they had to guard us and it was really going to be hard for them to defend us,” Brantley said, “so if we just rebounded and boxed out, we would be in fine shape.”

The result was the Terps‘ most complete performance of the season and an impressive start to what will be a challenging conference schedule.

“We just wanted to make sure we came out with a great start,” Cowan said, “and then in the second half we knew we just couldn’t let down. We just kept defending, kept rebounding, kept pushing the ball and were able to get easy buckets at the other end.”

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Read more from columnist Peter Schmuck on his blog, “The Schmuck Stops Here,” at baltimoresun.com/schmuckblog and follow him @Schmuckstop on Twitter.