Sharing this infographic that I update at the conclusion of each year.
We are fully back. By my objective-ish methodology, the BU era is now equal to the Before and During Dee era (1980 - 2006) of Illini basketball. And BU is quickly becoming the most decorated coach in Illini basketball history.
As a reminder, I started this a few years ago to:
a) Quantify the successfulness of a full season - regular season and post season summed together rather than thinking of them in a more siloed way.
b) Understand what our expectations should realistically be as a program.
c) Give context / a frame of reference for all the differing opinions about what those expectations should be. For example if one person's frame of reference is the After Dee years and another's is the BDD years, those expectations will probably deviate wildly. I wanted to visualize that.
Methodology:
Basically, I assign a point value to all the relevant milestones that happen throughout a season. (Scoring system is below) Then, I sum up those values and turn them into a percentage of the total points possible for that particular year. A perfect season would have a score of 100. Different years have different points possible due to number of games, conference tournaments, and size of the tournament field. This allows me to standardize the results across different eras.
This year, I did increase the value of a Final Four. It always bothered me that 1984 scored higher than 1989, but it was easy to view that as an anomaly..until this year's team scored a little bit lower than I felt was fair. Even still though, this year ranks as our 6th best season behind three non-Final Four teams: 1984, 2001, and 2021. Won't lie, that still seems not right to me, but I'm trying to keep in mind the point of this - to look at the season in its totality and not overvalue too much the one game difference between an Elite Eight and a Final Four for example.
View attachment 50016
Scoring:
View attachment 50017
