By using our predictive statistics, we are able to take a guess at which Round 2 Illinois high school football playoff games should be played between two teams of equal strength, given their point-scoring and point-holding abilities demonstrated so far this season.
In order of closeness of the match-up, based on our predictive statistics compiled after the first round of the playoffs, we present the games and report each team’s chances of winning:
- (5A) #3 Montini (8-2) 52%, #6 Sycamore (7-3) 48%
- (1A) #1 LeRoy (10-0) 55%, #9 Flanagan-Cornell-Woodland Coop (8-2) 45% — models contradict
- (7A) #2 Benet Academy (9-1) 54%, #3 Oswego (9-1) 46%
- (3A) #3 Pleasant Plains (9-1) 55%, #2 Unity in Tolono (9-1) 45%
- (1A) #6 Stark County (8-2) 57%, #3 Mooseheart (9-1) 43%
- (8A) #1 Neuqua Valley (10-0) 59%, #9 Bolingbrook (8-2) 41%
Neuqua Valley and Benet Academy both won on Friday night. Remaining games are on Saturday.
On Saturday afternoon, Unity High School in Tolono defeated Pleasant Plains, 22-7, a slight upset based on our predictive statistics. Both teams had very impressive seasons, losing only one game during the 9-week regular season. Unity’s loss came in Week 3 to Central A&M (9-1), and the Pleasant Plains Cardinals lost in Week 3 as well, to Williamsville, which is undefeated this year, even after today’s playoff game.
Montini defeated Sycamore on Saturday afternoon, following our probabilities, slight as they may have been.
The LeRoy Panthers defeated Flanagan-Cornell/Woodland Coop in a shoot-out Saturday afternoon, 78-46. The 124 points scored in this game made it the game with the most points scored in Illinois football this year. The previous high combined point total was a Week 4 game between Lexington and Deer Creek-Mackinaw, also in the Heart of Illinois conference, where LeRoy finds itself. Deer Creek-Mackinaw won that game on Sept. 14, 58-56 (114 total points).
During the 2011 Illinois football season, three games had combined point totals higher than this year’s LeRoy-Flanagan Coop game: Eureka Coop 66, Rantoul 62—Eureka’s only victory in 2011—[128 points] (Sept. 3); Marist 64, Carmel 63 [127 points] (Oct. 14); and Orion 65, Momence 60 [125 points] (Oct. 29). Also, the game ties last year’s fourth highest-scoring game between Winnebago and Rockford Lutheran, 75-49 [124 points] (Sept. 30).
This gives us a chance to take a look, from a historical perspective, at high scoring games in Illinois high school football: First, this season isn’t over yet, but people think championship teams usually put a good defense on the field, which would seem to hold the point total in playoff games (beyond the first round) down. However, history, at least in Illinois, doesn’t really support this hypothesis. Last year, for example, the Orion-Momence game occurred during the playoffs, and the seventh highest-scoring game between Montini and Joliet Catholic Academy was the state championship, played in Memorial Stadium in Champaign.
In other words, two of the top seven games in the 2011 season were played during the playoffs, although Orion-Momence was a Round 1 game. If we consider the top 100 high-point total games last season, we find that 11 were Round 1 playoff games and five were playoff games beyond Round 1.
The number of regular-season games in the top 100 was therefore 84. The regular season represents about 91.2 percent of all games played in Illinois and made up only 84 percent of the top 100 highest-scoring games. Round 1 of the playoffs, on the other hand, makes up about 4.5 percent of all games played, but 11 percent of the top 100 highest-scoring games last year were played during Round 1 of the playoffs. This seems to give us a historical perspective on the hypothesis: Round 1 of the playoffs is likely to produce a higher probability that a game will be a high-scoring shoot-out than any other week during the high school football season.
The remaining playoff games make up about 4.2 percent of all games played in Illinois, and 5 percent were in the top 100 during the 2011 season. In other words, a game played during the playoffs, except during Round 1, has almost exactly the same probability of being a high-scoring game as a game played at any time, on average, during the entire football season, including the playoffs.
The Rebels from Stark County High School in Toulon defeated Mooseheart in their Round 2 game Saturday, 52-14. Our computer models thought the game would be closer than it was, and the IHSA seeding was higher for Mooseheart than for Stark County.