Our usual Monday-afternoon report of high school football in Illinois has very few surprises from an overall perspective.
In all, 570 varsity teams played games, with 554 of them playing Illinois opponents and 16 of them playing out-of-state opponents. The Illinois teams won seven of those 16 games against out-of-state opponents while losing nine of them.
Victory margins for the 277 games in which an Illinois team played another Illinois team ranged from one point to 63 points. The mean margin of victory in these games was 22.37, with a standard deviation of 14.63.
The mean was slightly higher than the median (21), indicating a small tail on a frequency histogram toward the upper victory margins, typical of the first week of any season, since teams start out with such diverse levels of preparedness.
By the end of the season, as teams get more comfortable working together, the victory margins should not vary so widely. However, as the graph below reveals, 19 games, or about 7 percent of all games between two Illinois opponents, were decided by three points or less.