Illinois Football 2024 Season Analytics Part I

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.  

Better Late Than Never: An Open Letter to the White Sox regarding the Legacy of Dick Allen

A lot can happen in 3 years.  3 years ago I started the below blog post and for whatever reason left it in draft status.  Earlier this month I saw this announcement on the Baseball Hall of Fame website.  Seeing that  Chicago White Sox legend Dick Allen was again being considered for enshrinement made me want to do something on his behalf.  Then, I remembered I already did, well at least I started.  A lot can happen in 3 years.  

Aside from correcting multiple grammar and spelling errors, the de-mothballed post is the same as when I started it three years ago. The only exception is that I have color-coded the first three paragraphs, put important statements in bold, and italicized the entire tome (Not Jim Tome; that's a Hall of Famer of a different spelling). The green indicates that the statements are still valid some 1100 days later. The red indicates they are not. I'll be back at the end to further my point.

Dear White Sox Organization: 

 First and foremost, I would like to wish you a joyous and happy holiday season. Secondly, I would like to congratulate you on the fine baseball season you just finished. It is truly an exciting time to be a White Sox fan. I have been a Sox fan going on 50 years. I can not emphasize enough how the accomplishments of one player brought me into the White Sox fan base.  A  player who sadly I don't think your organization has spent enough time heralding his accomplishments while on the South Side.  This player is no other than Dick Allen, The 1972 AL MVP in his first year for the White Sox.

There are two things I'd like to see the Sox organization do to honor Mr. Allen's legacy.  The first is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his MVP season in 2022.  The impact of Dick Allen on the White Sox is legend.  He revitalized the team mobilized the fan base and squashed all the talk of moving the franchise from Chicago to Florida.  His homers at Old Comiskey Park especially those rooftop shots are why a 7-year-old boy raised to be a Cubs fan flipped allegiances and spent his days wanting to emulate his new heroes like Bill Melton, Wilbur Wood, Bucky Dent, Jorge Orta, and especially Allen himself.  

I hope you guys have something like this in mind because a celebration on the scale that I'm thinking should have been planned years in advance.  

Secondly, I would love to see the White Sox publicly champion the HOF candidacy for Mr. Allen.  In my opinion, Allen is the most deserving player in White Sox history for enshrinement in Cooperstown.  Actually, I believe he is the most deserving former player in the entire league who is not yet been voted in.  I was very happy when Minnie Minoso got in this year on the Golden Days Era Ballot..This may seem like blasphemy at 35th and Shields but I feel Allen is more deserving than Minoso for a spot in Cooperstown.  I understand that looking at the advanced metrics bears my thoughts out.  I was heartbroken when Allen missed out by 1 vote again this year.  He now has to wait 5 more years before his case can be reviewed again.

A lot of this heavy lifting needs to be done by Allen's first team the Phillies.  He played the brunt of his career there and I am glad to see that there is a greater acknowledgment of the racism he endured while in Philadelphia.  What I ask of the White Sox is that in the next 5 years, they begin stating Allen's case every time they have the opportunity.  There are still very many White Sox fans of my generation and the generation previous to mine who understand the impact Dick Allen had for the Southsiders in the early 70's.  I ask that the management of the Sox while continuing to look to the future and endeavoring to bring more pennants and World Series championships to their fan base also look back at the past especially the accomplishments of Allen and celebrate what he brought to the team and lobby for his accomplishments to be recognized and honored by the powers that be at Cooperstown and beyond.

A few years back Jerry Reinsdorf lobbied hard for the HOF candidacy of Harold Baines.   I have long been a proponent of Baine's inclusion in Cooperstown.  Reinsdorf did the right thing by helping make the case for Baines.  Reinsdorf had seen firsthand the impact of Baines on the White Sox and knew in his heart that Baines was HOF material.  Dick Allen was long gone when Reinsdorf became owner of the Sox.  Reinsdorf and the White Sox need to understand that although they did not experience it Allen's impact on the White Sox and on baseball in that era was actually far greater than the impact Baines had.  Baines had HOF teammates like Carlton Fisk and Frank Thomas.  

That is where I left things off in 2021

Dick Allen (Circa 1965)
Public Domain

Here in the present (11/23/24) Dick Allen is a candidate once again for the enshrinement in Cooperstown that eluded him in his lifetime.  Having missed out on the highest individual honor in baseball by only 1 vote in his last 2 elections, he again is considered a front-runner.  This year he is joined by Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Harris, and Luis Tiant.  All these players are certainly worthy of consideration, and many deserve their own plaque in Cooperstown.  I would still argue that none of these players are more deserving than Allen.  

On December 8th a 16-member Hall of Fame Panel will convene at the Baseball Winter Meetings to decide if any of these players will make it for 2025.  Anyone receiving 12 votes or more from the committee will become a Hall of Famer.  Anyone who doesn't will have to wait until 2028 to even be considered to be a finalist again.  Dick Allen shouldn't have to wait that long.

He actually shouldn't have had to wait this long.  Allen was not the malcontent nor rabble-rouser that people portrayed him as.  He had been vindicated from most of that in his lifetime.  Some of it remains from the atmosphere of racism that followed his career and his BBWAA-era candidacy.  If you're not aware of Allen's experiences as the first professional black baseball player in then-segregated Little Rock, Arkansas while a Phillies farmhand in 1963, this article is a good place to start. Moving to Philadelphia in 1964 and having one of the greatest rookie seasons in MLB history, didn't stop the unfair treatment.  He wasn't allowed 548to go by his preferred name Dick but was relegated to becoming the diminutive Richie, a move which can only be construed now some 60 years later as a thinly veiled attempt to keep him in his place.  

His place is in the Hall of Fame. Yes, injuries shortened his career and certainly, he would have been helped by a longer body of work, but what a body of work.  The 7-time all-star, according to Baseball Musings, Day by Day database the 1964 Rookie of the Year and 1972 MVP in his first 6 seasons (1964-1969) was ranked 20th in at-bats. but ranked higher in 9 other offensive categories  including 5th in runs, 3rd in triples, 8th in both home runs and RBI, 9th in walks, 10th in batting average, and  1st in slugging percentage. Allen's slugging percentage was .555 in that 6-year time. Here is a list of the 10 fellows directly behind him.

Frank Robinson      .552   HOF

Willie McCovey      .551  HOF

Hank Aaron             .548  HOF

Willie Mays             .539  HOF

Harmon Killebrew   .535 HOF

Roberto Clemente    .511 HOF

Willie Stargell          .510 HOF

Reggie Jackson        .508 HOF

Carl Yaztrzemski     .507 HOF

Ron Santo                .505 HOF

This is just one example of Allen's on-field accomplishments putting him among the elite players of his generation.  Allen is also revered by many players who played alongside him.  One is Hall of Famer Allen's former White Sox teammate Rich Gossage.  I'm going to end this post with a quote from Gossage for a 2014 USA Today article about Allen and the Hall of Fame.  Goose puts it more eloquently than I ever could.  

"I've been around the game a long time,'' Hall of Fame pitcher Goose Gossage tells USA TODAY Sports, "and he's the greatest player I've ever seen play in my life. He had the most amazing season (1972) I've ever seen. He's the smartest baseball man I've ever been around in my life. "He taught me how to pitch from a hitter's perspective, and taught me how to play the game, and how to play the game right. There's no telling the numbers this guy could have put up if all he worried about was stats. "The guy belongs in the Hall of Fame.''

8 Score and 1 Year ago ...

Today is the 161'st anniversary of the Gettysburg address,  If I had a bucket list, visiting Gettysburg would definitely be on it.  

Last year, during the A to Z challenge, I published this post, which includes a video of the address plus an 8-minute film telling the story behind the movie The Last Full Measure. I included it because The Last Full Measure is a line from the address.  

I just knew that if I Googled the Gettysburg Address Rap, I would find something. I was not disappointed. I have included it here as well to help commemorate the day.

   

Publishing My Concerns, 35 Years and Counting.

 In April 1990 I wrote my first letter to the editor.  It was published in the April 27th edition of the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper.  Over the years I have written many letters to the editor of various newspapers.  After writing one for my college newspaper that was fairly well received, I was asked to be a regular columnist for the paper.  I had previous experience before 1990 in editorializing when I was self-publishing a small newsletter and mailing it out to my friends.  I have also freely shared my opinions on this blog and other computer venues since the geo-cities days. But,  April 1990 is what  I will always consider the beginning of my public spouting of opinions.

 Recently, I obtained a copy of that original letter. My letter was inspired by a column I had read in the Daily Herald a few weeks earlier. I am reprinting it here in it's original form, including the size of the columns when it appeared in print.   Please note I did not write the headline.

Reaction to Trump

As I read Burt Constable's column 
 on April 15 about Moslems reaction
 to Donald Trump's Taj Mahal, it got 
me wondering what a Christian's re- 
action to the Taj should be.

As Constable mentioned, the Taj,
Trump's $1 billion dollar gambling den has 
chandeliers alone that cost $14 mil-
lion. Fourteen million dollars. Do 
you know how many people you can
feed with that money? How many
non profit organizations could go out
of debt? You could probably even pay four or 
five pro athletes' salaries on that a
year, but that's another story.

Donald Trump's very name has

become synonymous with conspicu-

ous consumption, greed and arro-

gance. He is now linking himself

with gambling more and more.

The Bible is clear that it is of little

good if you gain riches at the ex-

pense of your soul. But Trump has 

shaped an empire that glorifies and

leads people towards wanting to

make more and more and spend it on

their own pleasures.  

The renowned mathematician

Pascal said that within each heart

there lies a God shaped vacuum that

can only be filled by Him. Why is 

Donald Trump not satisfied with all

he has amassed? Because he is shov-

ing money, power, and Taj Mahals

galore in that vacuum and still com-

ing up wanting. If he was not, why 

the overriding desire to gain the 

whole world?

Christian's need to be appalled by

buildings like Trump's Taj not be-

cause they desecrate a symbol but

because they desecrate a system:

giving everything of yourself for the

express glory of God. Trump lives 

like the dollar sign should be our 

symbol rather than the Cross.

It was not lost on me that my first foray in editorializing was about Donald Trump who is a frequent topic of my opinion based writings.  It is somewhat surprising that my description of Trump form 35 years ago still resonates with me.  The truth is that from before I wrote this piece until He began running for President in 2015, I didn't really pay much attention to Trump. I watched the occasional episode of The Apprentice, but that was about it.  Even when I wrote this piece, Trump was more of a counter example of what Christians should be focusing on. I just enjoy taking ideas like Constable's that Moslems should be offended by calling a Casino the Taj Mahal and turning it on it's side, in this case to  explore if people other than Moslems should be offended as well.  I chose Christians, particularly Bible believing Christians, because that what I was, and am still.  

I still like to employ that strategy in my opinion pieces.  It's like Editorial Jazz, I take a piece and riff on it it in a different direction that reflects the point I want to make.  In fact I am contemplating writing another letter to the Daily Herald using my first letter as a starting point to ponder Trump's popularity among my people, Bible believing Christians.  If I ever produce those 300 words or so I'll post it here as well.  Haven't come to the point where I know exactly what I'll say yet, but as I sometimes do I already have a title, "Trump hasn't changed, have Evangelicals?".

Weekly Writer's Workshop: 10 of my favorite Comic Strips

Here are the prompts for this week’s Writer’s Workshop: 

1.  Write a post based on the word shopping. 
2. Write a post in exactly 10 sentences. 
3. List ten of your favorite comic strips (from the newspaper). 
4. Write about a time when you laughed at an inappropriate time. 
5. Write about a joke (practical or otherwise) that did not go over well. 
6. List things you oddly obsessed about as a child.
   

I love comic strips.  I think I always have and I'm pretty sure I always will.  

Here are 10 of my favorite strips but not my favorite 10 strips

Rubes by Leigh Rubin

This is actually my favorite strip of Rubes.  I remember reading it in the Western Courier (my school campus newspaper). To learn more about Rubes click here.

Frank & Ernest by Thaves

The rest of the strips with images are not my favorite strip of the series I'm using them because I have previously used them on this or one of my other blogs.  This strip is a good representation of the regular content over the years. for more about Frank & Ernest click here.

Mister Boffo by Joe Martin

Along with Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts & The Far Side, Mister Boffo, is probably one of my favorite 4  comic strips of all time.  The strip below while very representational of Martin's humor is definitely not up to his usual standards. For more Mister Boffo strips click here.

Non-Sequtir - Wiley Miller

Many of the Out There Comics like Far Side and Rubes   take place in a panel rather than a strip.  I think this is why I like Non-Sequtir so much it often appears in strip form strip rather than a panel.  For more about Non-Seutir click here.

Big Nate by Lincoln Pierce

The strip below embodies the titular character very well.  For more about Big Nate click here.

Animal Crackers By Mike Osburn

While Animal Crackers is a comic strip that appears in newspapers, this is not how I first digested it.  I remember strips being excerpted in some of my middle school textbooks and discovered it in newspaper version years later. For more Animal Crackers click here.

For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston

Paramount Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

.

The above picture has nothing to do with the aforementioned comic strip.It's just I did not have permission to post any of the above strips but only used them since I had already used them on blogger before.  The above images or from the 1919 Cecille B Demille silent film For Better For Worse.

For Better or For Worse is a family comic strip that is humorous but also more realistic than many comic strips of it's era.  One way it was more realistic was the stylistic choice to age the family in real time.  At some point Johnston reversed the aging process and began telling the family story anew.  For examples of the strip click here.  

The Far Side by Gary Larson

I love The Far Side.  Gary Larson has a bizarre sense of humor and his artistic style blends very well with that humor.  One of my favorite strips is where you see a cat following signs scrawled out that say Cat Fud.  The signs eventually end at the inside door or a dryer,  While the cat appears to be following those signs into the dryer.  You can see dog waiting on the other side of the door ready to push it closed if the cat goes in.  The thought bubble above the dog says "Please! Let this work! For examples of the Far Side Strip click here.

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Calvin & Hobbes originally ran from November 18, 1985, to December 31st, 1995. Words cannot really describe what a wonderful experience it was for me to spend 10 years with Calvin and his stuffed tiger.  I adored every scrape they got in and don't really have a favorite strip.   Since I recently turned 60, I decided to put a link to the Calvin & Hobbes Strip from when I turned 30. The Strip features Calvin's Love Interest/nemesis. Susie Derkins.  It also use the phrase opposite day which is a phrase we use around the house quite a bit and I was unaware that Calvin ever talked about the concept.

Peanuts By Charles M Schulz

By Samsz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5250404765

I have tried hard not to rank these comic strips or even say that they are my top 10 favorites. They are just 10 of my favorites. Peanuts, however, will always be my favorite strip. I'm sure that my love for comics strips grew from my love for Peanuts.  I once tried to learn French, just so I could read the French edition of a Peanuts anthology  at our library.  This strip is from the day I was born.  For more  Peanuts click here.

For more of this weeks Writers workshop click here.