Illinois Football is nearly ready for the next step. Is everyone else?

A good life coach would advise you to worry less about what other people think of you. They might say a person’s self-worth should not be defined by the opinions of others. After all, true confidence comes from within.

And in most scenarios life might present you, I think we could agree that’s good counsel.

But after the Miami Hurricanes leapfrogged the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the rankings to take the final spot in the 2025 College Football Playoff…

–without either team playing a game-

I realized that sometimes it does matter what people think of you. A LOT.

After all, that fateful decision prompted the Irish to refuse participation in any bowl game, opting to throw a pity party for themselves instead.

Meanwhile, Miami took advantage of their good fortune, racking up three more wins, a cool $20 million in appearance compensation, and a trip to the National Championship game.

You can use whatever logistical argument you might want to make to explain how the committee came to their final decision; there are plenty of good points to be made.

But there is no clearly defined rule, record, or statistic that can explain the matter definitively. The only thing that is for certain is the committee chose Miami over Notre Dame.

Not because I think that a preference of the Canes over the Irish has anything to do with Illinois football, but rather, I don’t think subjective decision making favors the Illini.

And the numbers bear that out.

You may recall the 2025 season ended with something of a slap in the face when despite a Music City Bowl win over Tennessee in Nashville, the 9-win Illini were omitted from the final AP Top 25 poll.

While I try to be cognizant of my Orange and Blue bias, I have discovered that the harder you look at those final rankings…the worse things look for Illinois.

There are a number of statistical measures one could point to in order to articulate this point, but there’s a basic metric that makes the negative bias obvious:

ESPN uses various analytical tools to assess the talent and potential of all 136 FBS programs. One of the more objective measures is a given team’s “Strength of Record” (SOR). This is a ranking system based on a team’s actual performance compared to the difficulty of the games played. It does not consider a team’s past performance nor pre-season rankings like the Football Power Index (FPI); it simply compares a team’s results against a universally applied baseline.

The Big Ten had four teams finish the 2025 season with 9-4 records. Here’s how their respective SOR’s ranked nationally:

• 16. Iowa
• 18. Illinois
• 19. Michigan
• 20. USC

Yet, here’s where everyone finished in the final AP Poll-

• 17. Iowa
• 20. USC
• 21. Michigan
• …..
• Unranked: Illinois

Before you tell me, “It was just a one time thing, get over it and move on…”

Let’s go back a year.

On New Year’s Day in 2025, Illinois beat South Carolina in the Cheez-It Citrus bowl to finish the season 10-3. The Illini’s season strength of record for the 2024 season was ranked 11th in the country. Their final AP Poll ranking? 16th.

In back to back years, Illinois has finished the year ranked by the Associated Press 5+ spots worse than its body of work would indicate it deserves.

It’s tempting to want to brush this off and forget about it, but there’s a larger implication at hand: Over the past three years, the CFP committee rankings have nearly mirrored the AP Polls when the first edition has been released after Week 10 of the season. When the conference championships are completed, again, the two rankings are often quite similar. It is a rare occasion for the committee to have a team ranked considerably higher than the Associated Press. Thus, it’s highly unlikely for Illinois to be saved from this AP oversight by a committee who can see what the media cannot.

This is a tough pill to swallow when it would seem that the next milestone for the Illini is an appearance in the College Football Playoff. As we have seen every year since the playoff system began, every single position a team can move up in the rankings is critical. Only one team has ever received an at large birth in the playoffs when ranked outside the AP Top 10: Alabama in 2025.

And do any of us really think that the Illini are going to be offered the same benefit of the doubt as the Tide?

Not only does Illinois have to contend with its own negative bias; it will have to overcome the positive bias of historical powerhouses as well.

I perceive the root cause of Illinois’ negative media bias is the fact that they’ve only won about 40% of their games in the time I’ve been alive (since 1995). The last time the Illini won 37 games in five years (which they have now done under Bret Bielema), was in the early 80s under Mike White, a time and place I’ve only heard stories about. The Illini have been losers for a long time; it’s probably hard for the rest of the college football world to believe they might actually be winners.

But as we’ve recently learned from Curt Cignetti and Deon Sanders, a lot of failure can be covered up by flair, attitude, and enough wins on the field.

Both Indiana and Colorado had seen a LOT of losing before their current head coaches arrived. For Indiana, there hadn’t been a 9-win season since 1967. As for Colorado, 16 of the prior 17 seasons had finished with losing records.

And yet the confident and outgoing personas of both head coaches combined with some on field success was enough to make the media forget that these guys were coaches at schools that weren’t supposed to be good. Indiana’s AP polling and CFP rankings have stayed right in line with their strength of record while Cignetti has been the head coach. Meanwhile, you could argue that Deion Sanders’ charisma alone may be why Colorado finished the 2024 season ranked 25th in the AP Poll, despite only touting a strength of record ranked 30th.

I don’t think Bret Bielema needs to start telling the world that Illinois football is going to the moon. He doesn’t need a cowboy hat or a new watch on his wrist every week. But if Illinois is going to take the next step, we will need to stack the deck in every way that we can.

Thanks to Coach Bielema, the Illini have done a lot on the field to shake off that tattooed persona of a lovable loser.

I just think we’re going to need to get rid of that perception off the field as well.