Illinois #16 in Final AP Poll
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Whats the final spot? Will Michigan sneak in?
Dan
Admin
Illinois #16 in Final AP Poll
Alabama #17
apnews.com
Alabama #17
NCAA College Football Rankings: AP Top 25 Football Poll
The official page for the AP Top 25 college football poll, a tradition since 1936. Keep up to date and view the latest ranking updates each week.
apnews.com
SMU goes up one spot for getting absolutely positively destroyed in Happy Valley???Illinois #16 in Final AP Poll
Alabama #17
NCAA College Football Rankings: AP Top 25 Football Poll
The official page for the AP Top 25 college football poll, a tradition since 1936. Keep up to date and view the latest ranking updates each week.
It looks like voters just decided that SMU was better than Clemson after all, which seems fair.
Ole Miss @ 11 tells me 2 things:
Coaches on X/Twitter help
The AP voters put too much weight on a terrible Duke (ACC was horrible) game. Yuck.
Coaches on X/Twitter help
The AP voters put too much weight on a terrible Duke (ACC was horrible) game. Yuck.
Fighter of the Nightman
- Chicago, IL
I’ll take it and be more than happy, but we should be ahead of Ole Miss. 
I thought we finished in the top 25 in '22?
Naw, we dropped out after our loss to Purdue, lost our next game then won our last regular season games but lost our bowl, so no way we were getting back in. We did get 1 vote in the final poll, so were the last team of the "others receiving votes" category.
What about 1985?
Seeing that historical list puts in stark relief just how terrible the Illini have been at footballing for the past 60 years. 
No. We went 6-5-1 and got zero votes.
RabidDawgClassic
- Los Angeles, CA
The 59-0 loss at Iowa sealed the deal.
mhuml32
Gesture of Northern Aggression
I was going to push back on this but......you're right. Their SRS scores are horrendous. Reminder, SRS is the standard score created by Football Reference to compare teams across eras. The higher the SRS score, the better. A zero is considered an average FBS team (which would probably be a 4-8 P4 team in most seasons).
Here are comparisons to the closest similar Illinois seasons, but also including this season for more context:
2024 Illinois - 10.63 (finished 10-3)
2024 Duke - 3.56 (finished 9-4)
1988 Illinois - 3.83 (finished 6-5-1
2008 Illinois - 2.96 (finished 5-7)
2021 Illinois - 2.20 (finished 5-7)
That's some massive performance luck there. '24 Duke is much closer to a 6-6 team than their actual results (by performance metrics).
Illinois has been playing football in some form since 1890. In that time, they've had 27 head coaches and 2 interim coaches.Seeing that historical list puts in stark relief just how terrible the Illini have been at footballing for the past 60 years.
Bret Bielema has been the coach at Illinois for 4 years now, and is already 10th all time in coaching wins at Illinois with 28, already having passed the following contemporary coaches: Lovie Smith (17 in 5 years), Tim Beckman (12 in 3+ years), and Lou Tepper (25 in 5 years). If he wins 8 games next season, he'd move all the way up to 4th, passing Zook, Turner and Mackovic.
Bob Zuppke, Ray Eliot, Mike White and John Mackovic have really been the only Illinois football coaches with any kind of sustained success across their tenure, and Mackovic only stayed for 4 years.
Epsilon
M tipping over
- Pdx
According to the Wolfe Ratings we are number 10. Anybody know what this is? According to this article, the NCAA recognizes us at finishing the season as 10th.
Fighter of the Nightman
- Chicago, IL
That team really was pretty unlucky, not that they didn't bring on some of that "bad luck" by uncharacteristically just not showing up for some VITAL defensive and offensive stretches in the Indiana, especially MSU and to a lesser extent Purdue games. However, you would think if just ONE of these things goes right, we probably end the year in the top 25. I'll go in reverse chronological order:
1. Hang on to beat top-5 Michigan in the Big House. After losing to Purdue as #21, we were still the 7th team in the receiving votes category. While it would be a decent jump, I have VERY little doubt that pulling off that upset on the road would get us back into the top 25, as we were almost in the top 20 just the week before. We then of course went on to utterly throttle Northwestern on the road, so we'd stay there and move up, too.
2. Just beat Purdue. We were ranked #21, and this would have clinched our spot in the Big Ten Championship Game. I think even if we lose in the same screw job fashion in Ann Arbor, they likely keep a top 20-ranked Illini team that lost by 2 to a top 5 team on the road ranked. This is probably the most frustrating one for this purpose, as we truly compiled on the previous MSU loss by dropping two straight to unranked teams at home and dug ourselves a hole that only upsetting Michigan could get us out of.
3. Avoid losing to MSU. We were ranked #16 in this game, so even if we went on to lose one close game to Purdue and also in Ann Arbor, just holding serve here likely gets us a high enough starting point (#13 or so?) that we can weather the storm and remain ranked.
4. Beat Indiana. Like some of our other losses, this one was obviously INCREDIBLY sketchy from an officiating standpoint, but even then we STILL should have stopped them on that last drive given how great our defense would prove to be. While we were not even receiving votes at this time, it fundamentally changes our hype, IMO. We didn't enter the top 25 until after we beat Iowa to improve to 5-1, and even then we were #24. After getting to 7-1 after the win at Nebraska, we climbed to #16. Just how high are we ranked after the Nebraska win if we are 8-0?? Just look at Indiana this year ... the pollsters will only care so much who you beat if you are undefeated.
Alas, for as much as I loved that team and for how much they meant to reviving this program, they unfortunately stumbled at FAR too many key points ... whether their fault or not.
What you call luck, I refer to as playmaking ability.
That's not what that means. Wolfe Ratings are one of the 6 mathematical ratings used in the CFP selection process, not "the official NCAA recognized rating". It's just one of the tools available to the committee to determine how to rank the teams.
It's similar to the basketball selection committee, they use the NET rankings along with several other tools to come up with a tournament selection (WAB, Torvik, KenPom, SRS, SOR, BPI, KPI).
The NCAA doesn't really "recognize" these ratings. This is just one of many selectors that exist and is acknowledged to exist by the NCAA. So if Oregon wants to use this rating system to claim they won the national title this year, they can. Doubtful they do, as nobody else in the universe would agree with it and everyone would probably laugh at them for doing so, but they can if they want to. And we can claim we finished 10th if we want to, but it would be a weird thing to do. Honestly, there is no rule preventing anyone from claiming a national championship, so if we want to humiliate ourselves publicly, we can go ahead and claim it too.
I don't know about the Wolfe Ratings, but I think a lot of these rating systems are based on an antiquated version of analytics and haven't been updated, and are beyond obsolete in the CFP (or even BCS) era. But yeah, if Oregon wants to run with it, they can, in the way UCF claimed a national championship after 2017 (at least they went undefeated and did not get crushed by the actual national champion in the playoffs).
Edit: Another fun example is the Colley Matrix which selected ND as its 2012 national champion after Alabama crushed ND 42-14 in the 2013 BCS championship game. As far as I am aware, the ND program has not attempted to claim that title.
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Fighter of the Nightman
- Chicago, IL
And not that we all need this re-emphasized, but it shows (A) just what an amazing job Bret is doing given our hype for next year and (B) how ESSENTIAL it is to have another good season next year with all of this momentum. Next year could be the second time we finish ranked in back-to-back years since 1951. Now THAT would be Bret truly cementing this turnaround as epic! Here is our next season after each of those rankings after 1963-64 Rose Bowl win...
1963 - #3
----> 1964 - Preseason #3 and bizarrely became unranked after losing to #4 Ohio State while we were ranked #2 ... might need some clarification here, lol. Finished the year 6-3 but unranked.
1983 - #10
----> 1984 - Finished 7-6 but lost every other game from September 15th to November 3rd.
1989 - #10
----> 1990 - #25 (below)
1990 - #25
----> 1991 - Actually popped into the top 25 a few weeks and were 6-3 before losing our final 3 games including 6-3 vs. UCLA in our bowl, lol...
1999 - #24
----> 2000 - Preseason #21 and rose to #17 before the Michigan disaster. Finished 5-6 and missed a bowl via a 61-23 drubbing at Northwestern to end the year.
2001 - #12
----> 2002 - Receiving votes to start the season ... finished unranked and 5-7.
2007 - #20
----> 2008 - Preseason #20 and finished unranked at 5-7.
2024 - #16
----> 2025 - ??? Looking like preseason top 15.
We have been disappointed in FAR too many important seasons. Let's change that next year!!
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