Registration for the Chicago Marathon is closed?

Up until last year I've spent each of the last five summers training for a marathon. The last two were attempts at Chicago. My wife and I got together a group of friends in June and started the Non-Runner's Marathon program. It's a program designed to take someone from "I can run for a half-hour" to "I can run a marathon". It's effective in its stated goal, but with such an abbreviated training curriculum, it is tough to recover if you become injured. We generally had a week or two to make sure that folks were interested before they signed up. This year we opted to start our training earlier, and it's a good thing that we did. Registration for the marathon closed even earlier this year. Even with our earlier start we had to get everyone to commit after just a week or two of running. There are some benefits of doing it this way. Everyone has a financial commitment to their training program. But I'd still like to have given a little more leeway in terms of time in case it turns out to be a bad fit.