House Money

This was gonna be the topic for my SOC tonight. It's all I've been thinking about this week. But I'm here in the lounge at Union Station in Chicago waiting for the 6:10 boarding time for my overnight train to Pennsylvania and I feel the need to write it out right now.

First, I need to define "house money" because 81% of you are going to read this and think it means "if we lose it's meaningless." There's always meaning. Every team that starts the season 4-0 wants to go 12-0 and any loss during the season prevents that.

But "house money" is when you have $460 in front of you at the blackjack table so you take your original $200 buy-in and put it in your pocket, playing the rest of the night with the $260 you've already won. You've done enough good that even losing it all means you're still walking away content. You're done gambling with your money and now you're going to gamble with their money.

In that construct, we've never had a house money game like this. You didn't pause long enough on that sentence so I need to type it out again. In your lifetime, we've never had a house money game like this.

The only season where I could maybe propose a similar house money game would be 1951. But that year we were chasing a national title. And looking at the schedule, the only game on the Big Ten schedule where we played a ranked team was against Michigan at home. IN that game, Illinois was #3 in the AP Poll and Michigan was #15. That's not really house money. That's "we're trying to win a national title here."

Maybe there was road game that year where we were playing with house money (at Washington maybe?) so perhaps those of you who are older than 73 years old have lived to see another game similar to this. But even then I'd argue that this game – on the road against #9 after a 4-0 start with two ranked wins – is the most house money we've ever played with.

Some stats to back this up:

• Since the end of World War II, there have only been three seasons where we started 4-0: 1951, 2011, and 2024. Yes, really.
• In 1951, we were coming off a season where we finished the year ranked 11th so we were 100% chasing a national title. We ended up finishing 4th in the AP Poll, 3rd in the UPI, and 1st in the Boand (the "official" national champion from 1930 to 1960, according to the NCAA). So there were no house money games that season. That was "any loss costs us this national title."
• In 2011, we started 6-0 and we did have one ranked win (Arizona State was ranked #22 when we played them but they finished the season with a losing record). There weren't really any house money games that year, though. We never had a "we can still have a great season even if we lose this" game. The first two Big Ten wins were Northwestern (3-5 in the conference that year) and Indiana (0-8). And then we played a very beatable Ohio State team (3-3 at the time) and a very poor Purdue team.

It's not required that we start 4-0 to have a house money game, of course. But even looking through other seasons (and thinking over the expectations each season), I can't find a situation similar to this one. I looked through the media guide at every season of my lifetime (I was born in 1972) and I can't find another game that meets this criteria:

1. Great start to the season
2. Very tough opponent where a loss is understandable.
3. Every chance to still have a great season even with a loss.

We've had plenty of those on the basketball court. The first one that comes to mind is the Texas game during the 2000/2001 season. In the previous three games we had beaten #7 Seton Hall in overtime (coming back from down 20 in the first half), then we beat the new #7 Arizona at the United Center, and then we won the Braggin' Rights game in overtime.

Going to Austin to play Texas immediately after that was a house money game. Nobody expected us to go 4-0 through that stretch with Seton Hall, Arizona, Missouri, and Texas, so after starting the stretch 3-0, Texas was house money. We lost the game... and were still a 1-seed come March (Texas finished the year #18 in the AP Poll, so they were no slouch).

The way I view house money games is that you have to be able to say "man, going 3-1 over these four games would be fantastic" and then you start 3-0. And please note that it doesn't mean "and then you can lose that last game." Our basketball game at Ohio State in 2021 was absolutely a house money game (nobody expected us to go 3-0 in the final three games which included at #22 Wisconsin, at #2 Michigan, and at #7 Ohio State, especially with Ayo Dosunmu missing the first two games after the broken nose), but 3-0 is exactly what we did. Ayo returned from injury and we won the house money game at #7 Ohio State.

So that's how I look at these three ranked games in October. Ask me a few weeks ago what I was hoping for against #19 Kansas, #22 Nebraska, and #9 Penn State and I would have told you that 1-2 would have been perfectly fine while 2-1 would be an absolute dream. 3-0 never even entered my mind. I would have given you 100-to-1 odds.

Now we're 60 minutes away from 3-0. And it's absolute house money. Let me see if I can put this in gambling terms.

We're dealt a pair of 8's looking at the dealer's 9 and we split them. Oh no. We get a 3 and a 7 on one of them and stick at 18 and then we get an 10 on the other one for another 18 while staring at a possible dealer 19. But the dealer pulls a 6 and then a face card and we win both hands.

We're feeling good about our mojo so we put down our biggest bet of the night. We're dealt a 12 and we're looking at a face card. We hit it and get a 2 for 14. We hit it again and get another 2 for 16. We stare down that face card and can just feel the 10 that's face down so we hit it a third time, expecting a bust, but we get a 5 for 21. The dealer turns over the ten we knew was there and somehow we beat a 20 after hitting three consecutive cards in the 2~5 range. And this was on our biggest bet of the night.

At this point, we take our buy-in and set it aside. For the rest of the night, we're betting with that money we won. We really have no business being up this much. We know that hitting 2, then 2, then 5 with all of that money out there was the hand of the night. So it's time for extremely relaxed, stress-free blackjack the rest of the night.

Can you think of another series of Illini football games that played out like that? Is there an Illini season where you felt like we were way ahead of the curve despite playing ranked opponent after ranked opponent? If we were to win tomorrow, is it maybe the first time we'd go 3-0 against our first three ranked opponents since 1983 (which did include a loss to unranked Missouri)?

Actually, I have the media guide right here, I can look that up. The last time we went 3-0 against our first three ranked opponents without a loss to an unranked opponent was....

OK yeah it's never happened. 1983 we beat our first three ranked opponents but we lost to Missouri in the opener (as mentioned above). In 1951 we won our first seven games before tying Ohio State but only two of those teams were ranked. The AP Poll goes back to 1936 and there wasn't one single season where we won games against our first three ranked opponents and were undefeated. Now I need to keep going and find all of the seasons where we won three consecutive games against ranked opponents period. Those seasons were....

1990 - Lost to Arizona in the opener but then won six in a row including #11 Colorado, #20 Ohio State, and #25 Michigan State
1983 - Lost to Missouri in the opener but then won ten in a row including four ranked opponents: #19 Michigan State, #4 Iowa, #6 Ohio State, and #8 Michigan.
1951 - Tied Ohio State in week eight but went 9-0-1 including wins over #20 Washington, #15 Michigan, and #7 Stanford in the Rose Bowl.
1950 - Lost to Wisconsin in the second game but then won six in a row including #10 Washington, #19 Indiana, and #1 Ohio State.
1946 - Early losses to Notre Dame and Indiana but then won the final six games including #20 Wisconsin, #8 Michigan, and #13 Ohio State.

That's it. We've only ever won three straight games against ranked opponents five times. That's not three straight to start the season... three straight ranked wins at any point in our schedule.

The housiest of house money.

One more thing and then I need to go board my train. Are you ready? I don't think you're ready. If we look at this through the eyes of, say, a Georgia fan, they would be approaching this game this way:

"A loss tomorrow isn't the end of the world. We have two ranked wins and we only need to go 10-2 to make the playoff so a loss is fine. The goal is to navigate our schedule without losing three games and then we're in."

That's true of Illinois. We could get blown out tomorrow and we can still say "beat Michigan, lose to Oregon, win the other five where we'll be favored and we're in the playoff." That's a true statement. Even if we lose tomorrow there's still a path to the playoff that only requires one upset.

Now, will that hold the rest of the season? Who knows? We could lose this one, get upset by Purdue, and be right back to "we really need to focus on getting to 6-6 because now we're going to start 4-4 after losses to Michigan and Oregon." This season could play out many different ways.

But in terms of "just beat two ranked opponents and now are playing a third before October", this is house money. Our buy-in is in our pocket.

Let's bet it all and see what happens.