2018 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Sun Belt

Last week we looked at how Sun Belt teams fared in terms of yards per play. This week, we turn our attention to how the season played out in terms of the Adjusted Pythagorean Record, or APR. For an in-depth look at APR, click here. If you didn’t feel like clicking, here is the Reader’s Digest version. APR looks at how well a team scores and prevents touchdowns. Non-offensive touchdowns, field goals, extra points, and safeties are excluded. The ratio of offensive touchdowns to touchdowns allowed is converted into a winning percentage. Pretty simple actually.

Once again, here are the 2018 Sun Belt standings.

And here are the APR standings with conference rank in offensive touchdowns, touchdowns allowed, and APR in parentheses. This includes conference games only with the championship game excluded.

Finally, Sun Belt teams are sorted by the difference between their actual number of wins and their expected number of wins according to APR.

I use a game and a half as a line of demarcation to determine whether or not a team significantly over or under-performed relative to their APR. By that standard, Troy significantly over-performed and both Georgia State and Texas State under-performed. Troy was a little lucky to finish 7-1 in conference play as they were 2-0 in one-score games. Georgia State was 0-1 in one-score games and they finished next to last in turnover margin in Sun Belt play (-6). However, the main reason their APR is significantly better than their actual record is their performance in their lone conference win. In their Sun Belt opener, the Panthers rolled Louisiana-Monroe 46-14. In their other seven conference games (all losses of course), the Panthers permitted their opponents an average of five offensive touchdowns per game! Meanwhile, Texas State also under-performed relative to their YPP numbers and we discussed some reasons for that last week, so peruse the back catalog of posts to catch up.

Head Coaching Turnover in the Sun Belt
The Sun Belt will welcome four new head coaches in 2019. Appalachian State, Coastal Carolina, Texas State, and Troy will all be taking the field without the men who led them in 2018. Some of those teams lost coaches thanks to their great success (Appalachian State and Troy), others thanks to their lack of success (Texas State), and others thanks to retirement (Coastal Carolina). That head coaching turnover is tied for the most the Sun Belt has experienced since the end of the 2005 season. However, the turnover in the Sun Belt is even more significant when you consider the other year the league welcomed four new coaches was 2018. Even if you disregard Coastal Carolina’s coaching change entering the 2018 season (when Joe Moglia returned from a one-year sabbatical to deal with health issues), that still means seven of the league’s ten teams have changed coaches in the past two seasons. Blake Anderson (Arkansas State) and Matt Viator (Louisiana-Monroe) are the resident deans of Sun Belt coaches as they enter their sixth and fourth year respectively. To give you an idea of just how much turnover there has been, take at look at the following table. It lists all the Sun Belt coaching changes since the end of the 2005 season (counted in the table as the beginning of the 2006 season) along with the reason for the change.

So what does this mean for the Sun Belt in 2019? It means the league is in transition. Appalachian State and Troy, two programs that have won at least a piece of the last three Sun Belt titles and finished a combined 41-7 in Sun Belt play since 2016, lost their head coaches. In addition, Coastal Carolina, a perennial FCS playoff participant will also be without their head coach as they enter their third season at the FBS level. If a lower-level team was to make a run at the Sun Belt title, this might be their best shot. The Sun Belt has been won by a (current) team other than Appalachian State, Arkansas State, Georgia Southern, or Troy just once since 2006 (Louisiana-Lafayette tied for the title in 2013 with Arkansas State).

Well, that does it for our conference recaps. Unfortunately, we still have about twelve weeks before the season gets started in earnest (only eleven until some sweet Week Zero action). In the intervening weeks, I'll be making another trip to Vegas with a requisite betting recap post. In addition, I will also have some intermittent posts on the NFL. More specifically, the Adjusted Pythagorean Record (APR) in the NFL. Be on the lookout for that this summer. And, as always, thanks for reading.