Illini Football 2026

#79      
Navy_illini
lstewart53x3 said:
For sure. Over the past few years, Purdue has been a very bad program. The loss to them on Saturday was embarrassing and it hurts.

But program hierarchy is not static or set in stone. It’s in constant flux. Over the past 30 years, our record against Purdue is 8-19.

So if we want to guarantee we’re consistently a step ahead of Purdue, we need more NIL than Purdue.

For example, if we’re at $25 million and Ohio St is at $50 million, they’ll win that game 95% of the time. With the current scheduling, that means we’ll beat Ohio St once every 50 years.

If we have $25 million and Purdue has $20 million, that’s a game we’ll win what, 67% of the time? We’ll be favored. We should win. But on average, with those odds, we’d lose once every 3 years.

So if we want to increase our win percentage, we need to increase the gap in NIL between us and our peers. We’ll still get upset, there’s upsets across college football every week, we’ll just get upset less and have a chance to upset the programs above us more.
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Not sure how accurate this is but checks with ur numbers. I will caution you have to be able to evaluate talent and find players to fit your system. The teams who do that will be successful in this era. I feel if this team is missing a couple pieces on offense to be dominant and several on defense

 
#80      
bluemountain
Navy_illini said:
Not sure how accurate this is but checks with ur numbers. I will caution you have to be able to evaluate talent and find players to fit your system. The teams who do that will be successful in this era. I feel if this team is missing a couple pieces on offense to be dominant and several on defense

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Numbers seem reasonable, although I'm surprised Iowa and Wisconsin are this low. Can a Moneyball approach work in CFB? We've seen TB and Milwaukee consistently compete in MLB with much lower spend than the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees, but not sure whether it works as well in football
 
#81      
Curbelo Fanboy
bluemountain said:
Numbers seem reasonable, although I'm surprised Iowa and Wisconsin are this low. Can a Moneyball approach work in CFB? We've seen TB and Milwaukee consistently compete in MLB with much lower spend than the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees, but not sure whether it works as well in football
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Depends on how you define "work". Really good coaching can put people in spots to maximize what talent they have. Bret has done this in the past. However as we see there is a limit to that. Good coaching will put you in position to win the "winnable" games & maybe the occasional upset type of game but it's gonna come up short against the big boys. You can build a solid 8 or 9 win type of program but football has such a physical element to it that at the top level it comes down to the Jimmy's & Joe's. As we proved in 24 & 25 we could beat most of the league but couldn't measure up against the truly elite of OSU & Oregon.
 
#82      
ChiefGritty
bluemountain said:
Can a Moneyball approach work in CFB? We've seen TB and Milwaukee consistently compete in MLB with much lower spend than the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees, but not sure whether it works as well in football
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The thing about Moneyball is that it's fundamentally about utilizing the player movement restrictions in the various sport's collective bargaining agreement to build around talent that you have locked in at a below market price.

In college sports, at least as currently set up and governed, there are no player movement restrictions. Jackson Chourio transfers to Bama for market price two years ago (or he blows up your budget to stay).

People think of MLB as this incredibly stratified free market, but that's not true at all relative to where college sports is today.
 
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