Week 1 Games

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#380      
OB positive
BrownTown said:
Best catch of the year might just have happened on Week 1. CJ DANIELS...that was outstanding!
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Yes and the only reason he was able to haul it in was because the secondary defender played the ball instead of the receiver. If he would have hit the receiver like he should have there would have been no chance for him to make that spectacular catch. Top priority is always doing everything possible to stop the catch in my opinion.
 
#381      
SoCal Illini
BrownTown said:
I'm not a huge metrics guy but ESPECIALLY NOT in football. Anything that requires tight unit cohesion, execution, and explosive short bursts of violence is not meant to be projected by a spreadsheet (my opinion alone).

If you want to use any projected value for recruiting...I'd suggest instead utilizing Coach weighted value. I think guys like Kirk Ferentz, Bret Bielema, etc who have proven year after years that they can win with 3 and low 4 stars holds as much weight towards a win over what 247 Sports classified your Cornerback as.

If Bama was being rated #10 after a loss AND Saban was the coach...think we would collectively agree that holds more value in a given ranking than a conglomeration of Stars given to 17 years olds multiple years prior.
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A lot of people share that opinion. In football especially, those so-called 'advanced' metrics often seem like a way for sports media to pretend they know more than the average fan. It’s just another product they’re selling (a crappy one) that, for some reason, people who don’t know any better evidently find informative.

Or in this case, mental gymnastics to ‘prove’ the sec is the best and no one else is worth even mentioning.
 
#382      
Thaillini22
hooraybeer said:
looks like we’ll be #11 next week
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Will Schrödinger's Hurricane make it harder or easier for us to move up?

Screenshot_20250901_132608_Chrome.jpg
 
#385      
Ander1345
IlliniSaluki said:
Would just like to point out that of the 4 AP top 10 teams that lost.

1) 3 lost to other AP Top 10 teams
2) 1 lost to a team not in the AP Top 10
3) 1 lost to a team not even ranked in the AP
4) LOLOLOLOLOL
5) LOLOL ROLL TIDE?

Grin Smile GIF by iQiyi
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Spy x Family and Loyalty crossover is unexpected.
 
#387      
Calvin
Dkayak said:
Since FPI shows no correlation whatsoever to performance on the field, what’s its value? Football Prestige Index?

Seriously, I was always taught you test your model before trusting it. This one is clearly a steaming load. ESPN should be embarrassed.
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And after #3 (BIG) knocks off #1 (SEC) by a touchdown, ESPN predicts....I'll save you the click. Another SEC team should (of course) take it's place because "no one made a bigger week 1 statement." You can't make this stuff up. Laughable.
 
#388      
altgeld88
Calvin said:
And after #3 (BIG) knocks off #1 (SEC) by a touchdown, ESPN predicts....I'll save you the click. Another SEC team should (of course) take it's place because "no one made a bigger week 1 statement." You can't make this stuff up. Laughable.
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Week 1 Games

There is nothing worse as a college football fan than expecting a decent season and having all hope lost by the end of the first game. 2009 game against Mizzou is a prime example.
www.illinoisloyalty.com www.illinoisloyalty.com

Post #330. The standard default observation about ESPN.
 
#390      
derrick6
Piotyr said:
FPI was changed recently to factor in recruiting rankings to a team's strength.

However, recruiting rankings are subjective and heavily dependent on the schools that recruit them.

So, in effect, FPI is double dipping prestige bias into their rankings, which in reality have nothing to do with a team's actual ability. I'd almost rather them try to factor in a program's coaching effect than this recruiting rankings garbage.

EDIT: Bill Connelly runs SP+, which is the raw statistical projections before the other factors are applied to FPI (like the recruiting rankings), and if you like spreadsheets, he keeps his data public and updates it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...lTaW4Q92Zpls/edit?gid=460827890#gid=460827890

He hasn't updated data from this week into the ratings yet, since there are still games today, but he has posted yesterday's post-game win expectancy (effectively, based on a team's statistical performance, the chance they should have won that game) and the lowest was from Ohio State yesterday (18%), which just reinforces that a competent QB performance wins that game for Texas. If anything, I came out of that game thinking a bit less of Ohio State.
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An attempt to value the franchise. Ok.
 
#391      
altgeld88
Illiniaaron said:
They got destroyed in their home opener for the second year in a row, this time in front of a sparsely filled Rose Bowl of mainly Utah fans. Not the greatest look.
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UCLA playing its home football games in the Rose Bowl is about as as sad as the Cleveland Indians playing in the old Municipal Stadium, which seated around 80k, in the '70s. Their average attendance was around 10,000 and it wasn't uncommon for them to draw 3-4,000. Imagine how demoralizing it would be to have that as your home field.

Every time I see footage of a UCLA home game "crowd" these days I wince. The Rose Bowl deserves better.
 
#392      
BashCtIllini
The Galloping Ghost said:
FSU was 2-10 last year. They were tied for the second-worst record out of all the P4. And Bama was manhandled. I'm unconvinced they deserve any benefit of the doubt here.
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FSU hired 2 excellent Coordinators and it showed.

I think football, more than any other sport, highlights where coaches rise above their abilities. Gus Malzahn was a mediocre at best head coach, but he is a top notch Offensive Coordinator. Tony White has been a consistently good Defensive Coordinator. FSU has always had talent, give them some good coaching and it could be a major turnaround in Tallahassee.
 
#394      
Mr. Tibbs
Illiniaaron said:
They got destroyed in their home opener for the second year in a row, this time in front of a sparsely filled Rose Bowl of mainly Utah fans. Not the greatest look.
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they need a total reset like we did after Beckman.

with the right coach , they can be relevant again
 
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#397      
the Castle on Daniel
altgeld88 said:
UCLA playing its home football games in the Rose Bowl is about as as sad as the Cleveland Indians playing in the old Municipal Stadium, which seated around 80k, in the '70s. Their average attendance was around 10,000 and it wasn't uncommon for them to draw 3-4,000. Imagine how demoralizing it would be to have that as your home field.

Every time I see footage of a UCLA home game "crowd" these days I wince. The Rose Bowl deserves better.
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They v much need a smaller stadium. The Bruins average 50% of capacity for home games. Some of that is distance from campus, but I wonder how big a factor student demographics and urban location are. It's a minority-majority, nerdier university with sizable Asian and Hispanic populations in the second largest city in the county that is heavily Asian and Hispanic. They may just not care about college football...
 
#398      
Fighter of the Nightman
illinoistradition said:
2009 game against Mizzou is a prime example.
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Yep, that was so brutal. The first season I really remember as a kid was 2002 watching us almost upset #1 Ohio State, but 2007 was the first year I remember truly being old/engaged enough to enter the season with some sort of semi-formed expectations. With that said, these are my personal early season games (I'll liberally define that as before mid-October, lol...) that just shook my confidence in that year's team, haha. Although we've had many bad years, we haven't had that much hype ... so the list is shorter than I assumed at first:

2009 W1 - L 37-9 vs. Missouri (St. Louis, MO). This was SO demoralizing. After the disappointment that was 2008, I distinctly remember people (for whatever reason) having a ton of confidence that 2009 would be our bounce-back season to (re-) capitalize on the Rose Bowl success. While Mizzou was a solid team, they were unranked and would finish 8-5 ... point being, if that Mizzou team was straight-up manhandling us in a nationally televised, opening weekend game where we knew we had to make a statement? Yikes.

2012 W2 - L 45-14 at Arizona State. Not gonna lie, I had convinced myself that we had all of this talent and still sucked under Zook so ANY "Xs and Os coach" was going to at least kind of fix things ... and I SOMEHOW convinced myself Beckman was that guy, haha. Let's remember, we started the previous year 6-0 and nearly ALL of the blame for the 0-6 stretch to end the year was on Zook ... so you could get yourself to believe the pieces were there to turn things around! This loss gave me SERIOUS doubts about how competitive we could be this season, and the beatdown vs. Louisiana Tech at home two weeks later (which I drove over to attend...) started sounding the alarm bells, lol.

2018 W7 - L 46-7 vs. Purdue. I know this one is way later in the year, but I SO distinctly remember being in Door County with my parents and wanting to make sure we could watch the Illinois game because I perceived it as so pivotal. We were 3-2, but that included a heart-breaking loss to USF at Soldier Field and a loss to #10 Penn State where we were beating them in the fourth quarter. I remember thinking if we could just get to 4-2, we could definitely find two wins after this one to make a bowl and really gain momentum. We instead got humiliated, a beatdown that would somehow be far surpassed a month later when Iowa laid that historic 63-0 loss on us (another time I decided to go all the way to Champaign...).

2020 W1 - L 45-7 at Wisconsin. I had pretty much given up on Lovie by this point, but I was (A) just excited there was going to be a (delayed) Big Ten season at all and (B) semi-hopeful we could build on our good end to 2019. I was at a cabin in the mountains in CO with a few friends watching this to get away from the Chicago lockdown claustrophobia, and one of them was a Badgers fan ... ouch. Lovie's tenure really ended for good on this day, IMO.

Thankfully, the post-2020 era has had more of the opposite! When we beat Nebraska in 2021 Week Zero in Bret's first game, you could just TELL something fundamental had shifted. When the 2022 team beat Wisconsin in Madison so badly that they fired their coach (my wedding day, by the way!!), I knew we had something special that year. Last year, the way we beat KU (and the exceptional home field advantage we had) actually got me to TRULY believe for the first time that Bret had us here to stay.
 
#399      
Piotyr
Oh right we're still in week 1 because UNC and TCU had to play tonight.

Anyway, Connelly has updated SP+ with game data thus far, and Illinois has jumped to 21, ahead of SMU, Clemson, Michigan, Iowa and Indiana.

Georgia is 1, as OSU slips to 2 despite winning because they were not the better team in that game, mostly because their offense couldn't do much. Texas dropped 9 spots because their offense was stinky despite getting more yardage. Bama dropped 13 spots, Boise dropped 17 spots (they were already behind Illinois), Notre Dame dropped 11 spots ( their game came out nearly even).
 
#400      
lstewart53x3
Piotyr said:
Oh right we're still in week 1 because UNC and TCU had to play tonight.

Anyway, Connelly has updated SP+ with game data thus far, and Illinois has jumped to 21, ahead of SMU, Clemson, Michigan, Iowa and Indiana.

Georgia is 1, as OSU slips to 2 despite winning because they were not the better team in that game, mostly because their offense couldn't do much. Texas dropped 9 spots because their offense was stinky despite getting more yardage. Bama dropped 13 spots, Boise dropped 17 spots (they were already behind Illinois), Notre Dame dropped 11 spots ( their game came out nearly even).
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SP+ rankings for the teams we play after one week of data: (bolded teams improved their rankings / italicized teams are ranked higher than us)

Illinois: 21 (+5)

Western Illinois: N/A
Duke: 34 (+11)
Western Michigan: 121 (-5)
Indiana: 38 (-16)
USC: 14 (+6)
Purdue: 87 (+14)
Ohio St: 2 (-1)
Washington: 43 (-3)
Rutgers: 64 (-16)
Maryland: 52 (+16)
Wisconsin: 40 (-1)
Northwestern: 107 (-18)

Just 4 opponents improved their ranking compared to last week. And just 2 opponents are currently ranked higher than us.

Ranking each game in order of difficulty based on SP+:

Ohio St: 2 (-1)
USC: 14 (+6)
@ Duke: 34 (+11)
@ Indiana: 38 (-16)
@ Wisconsin: 40 (-1)
@ Washington: 43 (-3)
Maryland: 52 (+16)
Rutgers: 64 (-16)
@ Purdue: 87 (+14)
Northwestern: 107 (-18)
Western Michigan: 121 (-5)
Western Illinois: N/A

I think it's safe to say that this season will be a success or failure based on the 4 road games against the 30's and 40's.
 
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