I agree with this for the most part but Chicago is more similar to New York and LA than Minneapolis and Detroit. A strong majority of sports fans in Chicago couldn’t care less about college sports and Illinois in particular. In these other cities there’s a lot more of a homer attitude. Minneapolis doesn’t think of itself as a separate entity but as part of Minnesota.
STL has 300k people. Chicago has 2.7 million. I imagine that has a lot to do with it.
I agree 100 % Illinois attendance problem is performance based, my point was Iowa, Alabama, Mississippi weren't the best examples by using states that college football is the ONLY thing to look forward too 12 months out of the year.
That's a bit disingenuous. STL City proper only has 300k, but the the STL metro area has over 2.8 million. For comparison, Chicago's metro area comes in around 9.5 million.
Speaking as a person from southern Illinois. The farther away from Chicago you get (especially now that the Rams are gone) the less people care about professional football/the bears. If we could at least win 6 or 7 games every year instead of being a complete embarrassment of a program like we have been the fans will show up. A region of a few million people should be more than enough to fill a 60,000 seat stadium. Having people come from Chicago is great but not necessary.
So we still have them by 70% instead of 89%. Cool.
My thoughts exactly. We undoubtedly suffer from lack of success recently, but NOT lack of tradition! If we build it, they will come. I think (not so far back) to the energy/atmosphere in the stadium during the ASU game in 2011.
Sorry to rehash this, but this comment had me wondering. According to this site:
Look at the rest of the big ten. Nebraska has won multiple national championships and has 300 plus consecutive sellouts. We are not the same. Iowa is probably most like us. Analysis complicated by Purdue-Ind, Michigan-Mich State, etc. Indiana's attendance also bad, Purdue has improved with Brohm. Not denying winning is important. Where are the highest number of Illinois alums. I can only guess but I will guess Chicago and suburbs. Why would we think that area is not important?
Here's another one from famous literature: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Pass me the Pepto, please.
Sounds like it. Not sure on Jake, anyone have any news there?
The turnover gods aren't handing out anything. Our guys have just been coming in prepared. Luck is preparation followed by execution. You don't wind up number one nationally week after week on luck.
I agree on forced fumbles, there is an art to that. Fumble recoveries are by definition, luck. There are 11 guys on the field, it's basically a 50/50 proposition. Currently, Illinois is recovering 73% of opponents' fumbles (16 of 22). That just isn't sustainable. They also are returning 23% of turnovers for TDs, which is just staggering and also not sustainable. For comparison, opponents are only recovering 44% of Illinois fumbles and only returning 8% of turnovers for TDs.
Robert from IB did an analysis on this and determined we were only +3 based on where should be based on TO margin assuming neutral "luck". Not that dramatic. We are just very good at forcing fumbles in the right places where we have opportunity to recover, and good at being in position for INTs. Will we regress to the mean somewhat? Sure, but no reason to think our turnover generating D won't continue to do its thing.
TOs aren't a miracle, they are taught and practiced. You don't lead the nation in TOs by luck.
