2018 Yards Per Play: Sun Belt

At long last, we come to the final conference in our offseason recaps. This week, we will be reviewing the Sun Belt.

Here are the Sun Belt 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 Sun Belt team. This includes conference play only, with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by division 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 2018 season, which teams in the Sun Belt met this threshold? Here are Sun Belt teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

Coastal Carolina, in their second year of play at the FBS level, significantly exceeded their expected YPP record and nearly finished bowl eligible. The Chanticleers were a decent, but hardly amazing 2-1 in close Sun Belt games, but their YPP numbers were so wretched thanks to multiple blowouts. Their other five Sun Belt losses all came by double-digits, with four coming by twenty or more points. On the other end of the spectrum, Texas State significantly under-performed thanks to an 0-3 mark in close conference games. A little bit of offense would have gone a long way for the Bobcats as they scored fourteen or fewer points in five of their seven conference losses.

Sun Belt Ranked Teams
In 18 seasons of existence at the FBS level, the Sun Belt has never had a team finish the season ranked in the top 25 of the AP Poll. A Sun Belt team has managed to climb into the regular season AP poll twice, but both times, they lost their very next game. Following the 2015 season, a former Sun Belt team did manage a spot in the final poll, but the conference itself is still searching for its first ranked finish. Appalachian State came agonizingly close this past season, finishing 26th, and the conference as a whole finished with an unprecedented three teams receiving votes in the final AP Poll. The following table lists every Sun Belt conference team that received at least one vote in the final iteration of the AP Poll for a given season.

While the conference has had just eight teams receive votes in the final AP Poll, five of those instances have occurred in the past four seasons, with three of those spots belonging to teams that were playing at the FCS level six seasons ago (Appalachian State and Georgia Southern). Sun Belt teams have almost no margin for error when it comes to finishing ranked (as evidenced by the 2018 Appalachian State team that finished 11-2 with an overtime loss at Penn State), but the conference has improved in the past half-decade. Before the next round of realignment cranks up and changes college football as we know it, I predict we will see a Sun Belt team finish in the top-25.