NU lost to Illinois St last night. At home. The halftime score was ISU 40 NU 22. It is not a stretch to project that this will be the Redbirds' largest halftime margin on the road all year long. What a travesty! Seriously. WTF?
Of course the loss has made the GAMBLE look worse. You may notice a couple tweaks has been made to the GAMBLE Report. We've added a column for overall team ranking (leftmost figures) because the bottom is relevant after all. We've also added space for a time series of comparisons (i.e., CCC spotted CBC a big head start -- is he making headway into that lead much like his team did against ISU in the second half?)
The overall statistic shows that for Gamble Report 1.02 ("GR 1.02") NU is now 44 spots behind where it was under CBC. This is primarily because the offense really stunk it up last night (CCC has fallen 30 spots further behind CBC), though the already improved defense stretched its lead marginally.
The underlying four factors are really in flux on offense but were surprisingly stable for defense given the small sample size. For offense the eFG% that was already down in GR 1.01 went down by 77 more spots in GR 1.02. On the flip side the TO% increased 127 spots from embarrassing levels to now merely average.
