2017 Yards Per Play: Big 12

Three conferences down, seven to go. Next up is the Big 12. Here are the 2017 Big 12 standings.

So we know what each team achieved, but how did they perform? To answer that, here are the Yards Per Play (YPP), Yards Per Play Allowed (YPA) and Net Yards Per Play (Net) numbers for each Big 12 team. This includes conference play only, championship game excluded. The teams are sorted by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

College football teams play either eight or nine conference games. Consequently, their record in such a small sample may not be indicative of their quality of play. A few fortuitous bounces here or there can be the difference between another ho-hum campaign or a special season. Randomness and other factors outside of our perception play a role in determining the standings. It would be fantastic if college football teams played 100 or even 1000 games. Then we could have a better idea about which teams were really the best. Alas, players would miss too much class time, their bodies would be battered beyond recognition, and I would never leave the couch. As it is, we have to make do with the handful of games teams do play. In those games, we can learn a lot from a team’s YPP. Since 2005, I have collected YPP data for every conference. I use conference games only because teams play such divergent non-conference schedules and the teams within a conference tend to be of similar quality. By running a regression analysis between a team’s Net YPP (the difference between their Yards Per Play and Yards Per Play Allowed) and their conference winning percentage, we can see if Net YPP is a decent predictor of a team’s record. Spoiler alert. It is. For the statistically inclined, the correlation coefficient between a team’s Net YPP in conference play and their conference record is around .66. Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2017 season, which teams in the Big 12 met this threshold? Here are Big 12 teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

No team significantly over or under-performed their YPP numbers in 2017. Oh well. However, that does give us more bandwidth to discuss other facets of the Big 12.

The Big 12 began play in 1996 and continued along in flyover country unfettered until 2010. By that point, the conference was in turmoil. Concerned that the Big 12 was looking out for Texas at the expense of the other members, several teams left the conference. Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas A&M all left prior to the 2012 season and the Big 12 replaced them with TCU and West Virginia. The current ten-team version of the Big 12 has existed for six seasons and since a reasonable amount of time has passed, I thought it would be interesting to look at how the member teams have performed. Here are the cumulative Big 12 conference standings since 2012.

Even casual fans could have predicted the Sooners would have the best conference record in that span, but some may have been surprised that their in-state rivals have the second best record, and perhaps even more surprised that five teams have a better conference record than Texas. In addition, the depths to which the Jayhawks have fallen are stark when laid out next to their conference mates. Three conference wins in six seasons is bordering on relegation territory. But a simple aggregation is not all I wanted to examine here. You could easily pull those numbers and record them yourself. No, I want to dig a little deeper. And the shovel we are going to use is the NFL draft.

To win games in any sport, you need good players. Recruiting rankings do a great job in the aggregate of predicting the best teams in college football. Of course, some teams tend to over or under-perform their respective recruiting rankings. Other authors on the internet have examined these teams and you may want to give them a read (after this one of course). However, there is another proxy for talent, but this one comes on the back end, instead of the front end. If you read the previous paragraph, you obviously know I am referring to the NFL draft. Here are the total number of draft picks for each current Big 12 team since 2013 (the first draft after the 2012 season).

Once again, Oklahoma is the king of the hill in the Big 12. The Sooners have had the most players drafted since 2013. However, while the Sooners have had 25 total players drafted since 2013, they have only had one player selected in the first round. Meanwhile, West Virginia has had nine fewer players selected than Oklahoma, but they have had three times as many first round picks. We need a way to quantify how valuable each of these picks are. In the interest of simplicity, I came up with this system: Since there are seven rounds in the NFL draft, a first round pick is worth seven points, a second round pick is worth six points, and so on, until the chaff in the seventh round are worth just a single point. Obviously, this system is not perfect as picks that occur alongside each other could be worth different amounts. The last pick in the first round would be worth seven points while the first pick in the second round would be worth six points. Another issue is the first pick in the draft is worth the same as the last pick in the first round. Of course, we are not attempting to create a perfect value system, but rather a proxy for estimating how much talent each team had on campus. With those caveats out of the way, here are the Big 12 teams ranked by Draft Points since the 2013 NFL draft.

So, the next step is obvious right? Let’s run a regression analysis and see how well this Draft Points metric predicts conference record. One step ahead of you. Conference record is somewhat positively correlated to Draft Points with an R squared value of .477 meaning roughly 47.7% of the variation in conference record is explained by Draft Points. So now, let’s use Draft Points to predict conference record and see which teams have over or under-performed relative to the talent on their roster according to NFL evaluators.

Oklahoma State and to a lesser extent Kansas State have won more games that we would expect from their talent. If I were into trite platitudes, I might say: ‘Their whole is greater than the sum of their parts’. On the other end of the spectrum, Kansas had more players drafted than conference wins. Ouch. Of course, Kansas is not the only team with reason to be ashamed. West Virginia has produced the second most Draft Points since joining the conference, but they have managed just a .500 record in league play.

This analysis has some shortcomings. Foremost, the 2018 draft has not happened yet, and several Oklahoma State players are likely to hear their names called, so this is a little biased in favor of Mike Gundy. Secondly, some solid contributors or even great players may find their skills do not translate to the next level. Their coaches and teams should not be credited for finding and developing an obvious talent who just happens to not have the requisite skills to play professionally. Thirdly, NFL talent evaluators are fallible. Maybe that first round pick is not really any good. Similarly, maybe that undrafted player has the necessary skills to contribute or even be a star. Finally, as I mentioned previously, Draft Points are a flawed proxy for talent. Is a first round pick worth seven times as much as a seventh round pick? I don’t have any idea. I was shooting for speed and comfort instead of a long-lasting metric. I’m sure there are other issues with the analysis, but I’ll leave them for you to critique. Still, I think this exercise was valuable. The two coaches who exceeded their expected record based on Draft Points ('Solomon' Gundy and Bill Snyder) are the best in the respective histories of their schools while the coach who most failed to meet expectations (non-Kansas edition) has been on the hot seat since his team joined the Big 12.