My daughter Lucy began college at the University of Illinois this year. As a result, I have become a U of I football fan. I ended up attending 6 home games this year. While this is certainly not more college football games than I've ever attended, it is 6 more Illinois games than I've ever attended.
It had been over 30 years since I'd had an every-game interest in a college football team. I have really enjoyed being a college football fan again. Everybody does being a fan in their own way. One of my ways is statistics. Over the next few weeks, I hope to share some Illinois stats that I've been developing.
One difference between college football and professional football is that you generally only play an opponent one time a year. It is possible to play a team more than once if your conference has a championship game or if you make it to a bowl game. But, in the regular season, it's just one per customer.
With that in mind, I've been developing a way of looking at a team's record for the year through how your opponents performed before and after you played them.
In essence, each opponent has 3 records: 1) the games they played before they played you,2) their record against you, 3) the games they played after you. Here is a look at these stats for Illinois with one more game left on their regular season schedule.
University of Illinois 2023 Football Schedule
Opponet Before Against After
Eastern Illinois Univerity 0-0 0-1 3-8
Kansas 1-0 0-1 4-5
Central Michigan University 1-1 0-1 3-5
Nebraska 3-0 0-1 3-4
Penn State 3-0 1-0 6-1
Purdue 1-4 0-1 0-5
Michigan 4-2 0-1 2-2
Oregon 7-0 1-0 3-0
Minnesota 5-3 1-0 0-2
Michigan State 4-5 0-1 1-0
Rutgers 6-4 0-1
Northwestern 4-7
Totals 39-26 3-8 25-32
Winning Pct .600 .273 .439
Illinois plays Northwestern next Saturday at Wrigley Field. We already know that Northwesterns record will be 4-7 for the before column. The only thing we don't know yet in the against column is the result of the Northwestern game as it has not been played yet. Eastern Illinois finished their season yesterday. All of their other opponents have one more regular season game remaining. This means that the 10 teams in the middle of their schedule should add one more win or one more loss to their after column next week.
Illinois opponents on average have played better before playing than after playing them. Illinois has only played 2 teams this season with a losing record and will face their third in Northwestern on Saturday. Conversely, six teams have losing records since playing the Illini. Illinois opponents on average are playing 160 percentage points better before their game with the Illini than after the event. Illini opponents are only playing .273 when facing Illinois this year. The final regular season against number will be between .250 and .333 depending on the Northwestern result.
Next Sunday I'll post an updated version of these numbers.
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