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2018-2019 Post Mortem
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<blockquote data-quote="dbeverly26" data-source="post: 1459660" data-attributes="member: 515868"><p>The conference has the same 14 teams every year, but those teams are not of equal quality from year to year. Even if they were, the schedules are not balanced -- we played 20 conference games this year vs. 18 last year, and drew a different set of teams that we only played once.</p><p></p><p>If you look at Illinois' adjusted efficiency margin (i.e. the stat that Pomeroy uses to rank teams), and see where it falls against the rest of the B1G, there's a pretty clear difference. Our AEM at the moment is +8.51, good for 83rd in the country and last in the conference. That AEM would have placed ahead of four teams (and just a hair behind a fifth) last season. There were ten (!) B1G teams in the top 50 this year, and 'only' six last year. There were three B1G teams outside of the top 100 last year, and none this year. The league was brutally deep at both the top and bottom, with absolutely no easy outs and an enormous amount of experienced talent on every team except maybe us and Rutgers. That wasn't the case last year.</p><p></p><p>I am not here to tell anyone to be happy about rooting for a team that finished anywhere from 10th to 14th in the league, depending on what metric you use. But it's crazy to not recognize that this year's iteration of the Big Ten was arguably as good as it's ever been -- unquestionably so if you look at the 19 years of data Pomeroy has collected -- and that it's a historically bad time to try and climb out of the cellar. This team was simultaneously worse compared to the other teams in the league and better than last season.</p><p></p><p>The good news is that the league will get at least a little bit weaker, primarily due to Northwestern and Nebraska fielding teams that are, you know, appropriate for Northwestern and Nebraska. How much talent we're able to retain and how much the rest of the league will lose is going to determine the rest of it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="dbeverly26, post: 1459660, member: 515868"] The conference has the same 14 teams every year, but those teams are not of equal quality from year to year. Even if they were, the schedules are not balanced -- we played 20 conference games this year vs. 18 last year, and drew a different set of teams that we only played once. If you look at Illinois' adjusted efficiency margin (i.e. the stat that Pomeroy uses to rank teams), and see where it falls against the rest of the B1G, there's a pretty clear difference. Our AEM at the moment is +8.51, good for 83rd in the country and last in the conference. That AEM would have placed ahead of four teams (and just a hair behind a fifth) last season. There were ten (!) B1G teams in the top 50 this year, and 'only' six last year. There were three B1G teams outside of the top 100 last year, and none this year. The league was brutally deep at both the top and bottom, with absolutely no easy outs and an enormous amount of experienced talent on every team except maybe us and Rutgers. That wasn't the case last year. I am not here to tell anyone to be happy about rooting for a team that finished anywhere from 10th to 14th in the league, depending on what metric you use. But it's crazy to not recognize that this year's iteration of the Big Ten was arguably as good as it's ever been -- unquestionably so if you look at the 19 years of data Pomeroy has collected -- and that it's a historically bad time to try and climb out of the cellar. This team was simultaneously worse compared to the other teams in the league and better than last season. The good news is that the league will get at least a little bit weaker, primarily due to Northwestern and Nebraska fielding teams that are, you know, appropriate for Northwestern and Nebraska. How much talent we're able to retain and how much the rest of the league will lose is going to determine the rest of it. [/QUOTE]
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2018-2019 Post Mortem
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