The Vagaries of Illinois Football

One thing I've learned over the last few years is that the difference between a winning team and a losing team in college football can come down to just a handful of plays. The ever-insightful Dr. Saturday provides an excellent illustration of this point in a post on his blog today. Despite what was only a narrow increase in net yardage from 2005 to 2006, Illinois went from 2-10 to a 9-4 Rose Bowl season. Yet despite another increase in net yardage this season, Illinois' record dropped to 5-7 and they failed to make a bowl.

As an Illinois fan, this season was obviously frustrating. In particular, the home loss to Minnesota where the Illini outgained the Gophers 550-312 but lost 27-20 due to 3 costly turnovers still burns. Yet was it really just bad luck or was Illinois systematically underperforming in a manner not indicated by their net yardage numbers? Dr. Saturday suggests the reason for the large discrepancies in Illinois' win-loss record over the last 3 years despite rather similar underlying statistics is the team's turnover margin. He provides a chart showing that Illinois was -15 in 2006, -2 in 2007 and -6 in 2008. Although their turnover margin was still unspectacular in 2007, it was worse in the other two seasons and undoubtedly that made a difference.

Still, I wondered if that was the entire story as to why the 2008 team declined by 4 wins. One theory I had was that the loss of Rashard Mendenhall might have made Illinois less effective in the red zone, since their passing offense relied on being able to spread the field. This theory didn't hold up, however, as Illinois scored on 82% of their red zone opportunities in both 2007 and 2008. And in fact, the team's scoring increased slightly in 2008 (28.7 vs. 27.8).

On the defensive end, however, the team gave up nearly 5 points more per game in 2008 despite allowing less yardage. The reasons for this are not quite clear. Indeed, turnovers were an issue as the Illini intercepted only 6 passes the entire season compared to 17 in 2007. That said, they also recovered 14 of 21 lost fumbles compared to just 8 of 19 the previous year, so they also benefited from some luck. Overall, there is no statistic that points directly to what went wrong. Illinois was worse at defending punt and kickoff returns in 2008, but not by a huge amount. It was slightly less effective in the red zone, but not unreasonably so.

It seems that these small differences (a few less turnovers forced, slightly worse special teams, slightly worse red zone defense) really added up, however, proving that the difference between a successful and a disappointing season can be thin indeed. It is possible to blame Ron Zook for the team's inability to win close games, but then again, it might just be bad luck. Fortunately, since the team's underlying performance has actually improved over the last three seasons and turnover margin tends to regress to the mean, there is every reason to expect that the team will rebound for a bowl berth next season and into Big Ten contention.