Our football pages have been significantly upgraded.
Some readers may have noticed we’ve updated the format on our football season-at-a-glance for this season by adding a four-year history of each of the match-ups. For example, Danville travels to Normal to play Normal Community West in a Big 12 conference game on Sept. 14. The season-at-a-glance table for Danville now includes the following line:
at Normal Comm West 0-0 [Δ ?, α ?] … W* 40-27, Nov 4 ’11
… L 15-14, Sep 23 ’11 … W 28-20, Sep 24 ’10 … W 26-0, Sep 18 ’09
This means West’s current record is 0-0 and we have no idea how to predict the outcome of this game. These parts were there last year, the year before, and for as long as I can remember doing this page.
But what comes after the “…” is new. It says that on Nov. 4, 2011, Danville played West and won, 40-27. The little asterisk next to the ‘W’ signifies that this was a playoff game or possibly the state championship. In this case, it was just a playoff game, since Illinois varsity football teams play the championship games after Thanksgiving, which could never be as early as Nov. 4.
This is the first entry in our posting of the four-year history of the match-up between Danville and Normal Community West. If these two teams met when any current senior on the team was at the school, we’ve got the results. We’ve been doing this for a while.
Some of the scores have not been checked rigorously, but we are pretty sure of the accuracy of most of the scores we will post. If we’re wrong on any of them, please let us know.
And coming soon, in the week of Aug. 13, graphics! We’ve got two weeks of graphics before the season starts, showing a few box-and-whisker plots of each team’s relative place compared to all teams in Illinois for a few key statistics. Then, once the season gets under way, we’ll be posting box-and-whisker plots right on top of each other, showing a comparison between where the team was last year and where it’s at this year.
New statistical graphs will be added each week, and we’ll keep an archive of all the graphs, which will be updated in real time as we receive the scores from the games from the IHSA. This usually happens immediately after the games are finished on Friday night or Saturday, but IHSA doesn’t actually post confirmed scores until Monday afternoon some time. Anyway, as soon as scores are available, even if they’re unconfirmed, we’ll update the statistical graphs.
