The Little Illini Conference has just completed its’ most successful regular-season non-conference schedule in years.
For the third straight season, the LIC has played all non-league games in the first two weeks of the season. That’s a front-loaded total of 16 games. This year’s non-league record was an impressive 11-5, a win total more than twice the 2024 mark of 5-11. The winning percentage of .688 was also the best since 2019, when the league was 6-2 for a percentage of .750. That was the next to last year the league operated with nine teams, reducing the non-conference total to one game per team per season.
The conference season begins next week, and will continue for the final seven weeks of the regular season. At this point, a full one-half of the LIC sports a 2-0 record: Casey-Westfield, Marshall, Olney, and Paris.
What does the fast start mean for the LIC come playoff time? Non-conference success often makes it easier to get to five wins and probable at-large entry to the playoffs. However, it’s also who you play that matters, because opponents wins are a tiebreaker used for admittance and playoff seeding as well.
The LIC got only three teams in to the playoffs last year, after a poor non-conference start to the season. The league landed six playoff spots (out of nine teams)Â in 2021, and five teams in 2019 and 2016. Those larger totals all came after winning non-conference campaigns. In fact, every year the league has finished with a winning non-conference mark, at least four teams have made a post-season trip.
Here is a look back at the non-conference win-loss record by the LIC dating back to the 2016 season. The record is in parenthesis, followed by winning percentage, and the number of teams that qualified for the playoffs:
2025-26 (11-5, .688, TBD)
024-25 (5-11, 312, 3)
2023-24 (6-10, .375, 4)
2022-23(5-11, .312, 3)
2021-22 (5-3, 625, 6)
2020-21 (COVID, a 6-game season in the spring of 2021 and no playoffs)
2019-20 (6-3, .667, 5)
2018-19 (5-4, .556, 4)
2017-18 (4-5, .444, 4)
2016-17 (5-4, .625, 5)
