YPP Throwback: The 2005 Sun Belt

This week, our YPP Wayback Machine takes us to 2005 and the SEC's little brother, the Sun Belt.

To refresh your memory, here are the 2005 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 team. This includes conference play only. The teams are sorted by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

The 2005 Sun Belt was pretty compressed in regards to the actual standings and the YPP data. A trio of teams finished tied for first, but they were just three games better than the two teams that finished in the basement. The YPP numbers told a similar story. More on that in a bit.

College football teams play either eight or nine conference games (or in this case seven). 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 2005 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.

No team significantly over or under-performed in regards to their expected record, although Louisiana-Monroe came close. The Warhawks finished 4-1 in one-score conference games, but with a chance to lock up an outright conference title, fell to their arch-rivals by 33 points.

Weird and Bad
2005 marked the fifth year of existence for the Sun Belt as a football conference. While the league was new, it was in flux. The conference debuted in 2001 with seven members: Arkansas State, Idaho, Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisiana-Monroe, Middle Tennessee State, New Mexico State, and North Texas. Those magnificent seven were either FBS newcomers or surviving members of the recently defunct Big West. In 2003, the league added Utah State, another Big West alum. In 2004, the league added three new members, with Florida Atlantic, Florida International, and Troy joining. The two Florida schools had just added their football programs in 2001 and 2002 respectively, while Troy was a Division II and FCS power looking to prove their bona fides with the big boys in FBS. After adding those three members in 2004, the league lost three in 2005, with Idaho, New Mexico State, and Utah State heading to (what appeared to be) a more stable conference in the WAC. Fifteen years later, the WAC no longer sponsors football, Idaho dropped down to FCS, and New Mexico State is a college football nomad playing as an Independent. I'm not here to criticize the decisions those three made, just give you some background regarding the environment surrounding the Sun Belt in 2005.

Perhaps due to the fact that four of its eight members had been playing football at the FBS level for less than a decade, the 2005 Sun Belt season was unique and for lack of a better descriptor, bad. We'll start with what made the conference unique and then touch on what made it bad.

Go back and take a look at the Sun Belt YPP numbers. Notice the top team (Arkansas State) posted a Net YPP of 0.89 while the worst team (North Texas) posted a Net YPP of -0.54. Since 2005, that is both the lowest Net YPP to lead a conference and highest Net YPP to finish last.

In fact, the 2005 Sun Belt is one of only two conference seasons since 2005 to have its top team finish with a Net YPP of less than 1.00 and its bottom team finish with a Net YPP of greater than -1.00. The only other conference to match that feat was the Sun Belt the very next year.

While the Sun Belt was unique in 2005, it was also really bad. Excluding the lone postseason game the league participated in (Arkansas State lost to Southern Miss in the New Orleans Bowl played in Lafayette thanks to Hurricane Katrina), here are the teams Sun Belt members beat in non-conference action.

OK, that's not entirely true. I did leave one victory out, but I did it for dramatic purposes. Outside of that one victory, which we'll get to in a minute, Sun Belt members beat five FCS opponents (including future Sun Belt member Western Kentucky) in 2005. That ain't good. And here are the teams they lost to, starting with the non-BCS conference teams.

Yikes. Collectively Sun Belt members went 0-9 against non-BCS conference opponents and lost by an average of more than 22 points per game. There were some decent performances, with Louisiana-Lafayette losing by a field goal to a solid UCF team, but there were also blowout losses to Army and Eastern Michigan as well as a loss to an FCS opponent. Things were not any better against BCS conference teams.

That's an 0-17 record with the average margin of defeat coming by 32 points. Obviously, some of those losses are expected (Texas and the SEC bloc), but Sun Belt teams were also non-competitive against some mediocre to bad Big 12 teams.

So who was the lone FBS program to fall victim to a Sun Belt opponent in 2005? It was actually a gut-wrenching loss preventing an SEC team from qualifying for their first bowl game in over two decades. That is none other than the Vanderbilt Commodores. I know Vanderbilt is typically at the bottom of the SEC pecking order, but they have actually been relatively successful over the past decade. They have qualified for five bowl games in the past ten years and actually finished in the final AP rankings in 2012 and 2013 under James Franklin. However, in 2005, Vanderbilt was far removed from even a moderately successful season. The Commodores were coming off four consecutive two-win seasons and had not finished with a winning record since their eight-win 1982 campaign. But it seemed like 2005 was the year for Vanderbilt to break that long losing streak. The Commodores had a senior quarterback who would go on to have a productive NFL and reality show career, as well as a few other future professionals. Playing in the SEC, the schedule would always be rugged, but the Commodores won their first two conference games (albeit against what would be the bottom tier of teams in the SEC West) as well as a tight non-conference game against their brothers in arms from the ACC. A tune-up against Richmond got them to 4-0 as the month of September came to a close. Entering the first weekend in October, the Commodores were actually receiving a few votes in the AP Poll (ranked 34th) and with winless Middle Tennessee State on deck, chances of pulling within one game of bowl eligibility seemed pretty high. The Commodores entered the game with the Blue Raiders as a two-touchdown favorite although some Vanderbilt fans had to feel a sense of unease as they had lost the previous two games in the series. You already know how this story ends. Middle Tennessee wound up winning despite gaining 209 yards of total offense thanks to a turnover (the only turnover in the game allowed the Blue Raiders to start a touchdown 'drive' on the Vanderbilt two-yard line), some chicken-shit playcalling by the Commodores (kicked a field goal from the Middle Tennessee two-yard line), a missed two-point conversion by Vanderbilt, and a blocked 36-yard field goal on the game's final play. The loss was the beginning of a six-game skid for the Commodores, although they did win their finale against Tennessee (first victory in that series since 1982) to keep the Vols out of a bowl game. I'm sure most Vanderbilt football fans (if any) were depressed after the 2005 season as they had blown what had been a great opportunity to get to a bowl game. Thankfully, it would only take three more seasons for them to return to the postseason. Much like 2005, Vanderbilt began the 2008 season 5-0 (and reached the top 25) before wheezing to the finish and losing six of their final seven games. They did pull off a minor upset in the Music City Bowl to finish with a winning record. So things worked out I suppose. Anyway, the point remains, despite being one of the worst FBS conferences of the modern era, the Sun Belt still managed to ruin the season of an SEC program in 2005.

Next week, we'll go back to the WAC as we close out the month of August.