YPP Throwback: The 2006 ACC

Greetings friends, since the college football season is looking less and less likely by the day, I have decided to post Yards per Play and Adjusted Pythagorean recaps of seasons gone by. This week, we look back at the ACC in 2006.

To refresh your memory, here are the 2006 ACC standings.

In case you have forgotten, 2006 was the year Wake Forest won the ACC for the first time since 1970. Obviously, when Wake Forest is winning the title, that is a reflection of the strength (or lack thereof) in the conference. When we get to the YPP numbers, you'll notice the Deacons were very fortunate to win not only the conference, but also their division as well. However, before we get to that, let me go through the sequence of events that conspired for Wake Forest to even win the Atlantic Division. You'll notice there was not a great deal of separation at the top of the division. Wake Forest finished 6-2 and a trio of teams finished a game behind them at 5-3. Of the Deacons six conference wins, four came by a combined seventeen points. the narrowest among them being the conference opener when they beat Duke (remember this is pre-Cutcliffe Duke) by a single point thanks to a blocked 27-yard field goal on the game's final play. They managed to beat two of the three teams that finished a game behind them (Boston College and Maryland), but lost to Clemson and needed the Tigers to choke the division away. And Tommy Bowden obliged. To go along with a blowout loss to Virginia Tech, the Tigers also gagged a pair of one-point losses to Boston College (thanks to a missed extra point) and Maryland (despite beating the Terps in yardage, penalties, turnovers, and time of possession). As for Boston College, the Eagles also dropped a pair of close games to give the division to the Deacons, losing to a bad NC State team and a Miami team that was about to fire Larry Coker. Once they won the division, the Deacons were fortunate not to have to play Virginia Tech (a team that had handled them in Winston-Salem in late November).  The Hokies closed the year as the hottest team in the ACC, allowing just 29 points in their final six regular season contests. Unfortunately, early season defeats to Georgia Tech and Boston College allowed the Deacons to face the more beatable Yellow Jackets. Keep in mind, this was before Georgia Tech instituted the triple option. The team did have Calvin Johnson, but Reggie Ball was his quarterback and Chan Gailey was his coach. A friend of mine in college once said those early to mid aughts Yellow Jackets were as enjoyable as taking The Eucharist. At the risk of eternal damnation, folks who watched the 2006 ACC Championship Game would probably agree. More on that later.

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, with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by division by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

Wake Forest finished a distant eighth overall in Net YPP and just fourth in the Atlantic Division! Statistically, Clemson was the best team in the conference and the Tigers buoyed that argument by beating both division winners by a combined 34 points! Elsewhere in the conference, Virginia Tech boasted a vintage Bud Foster defense, allowing under four yards per play to ACC opponents. Alas, the offense, quarterbacked by Sean Glennon (Mike's older brother), held the team back. The Hokies lost three games overall in 2006, and in two of those games (Boston College and Georgia in the bowl) they held future NFL quarterbacks (Matt Ryan and Matthew Stafford) to a 50% completion rate. This was truly one of the forgotten elite defenses of the mid-aughts.

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 2006 season, which teams in the ACC met this threshold? Here are ACC teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

The two participants in the ACC Championship Game, as well as the team Wake Forest beat in a de facto Atlantic Division title game all exceeded their expected record. The trio combined for a sterling 13-1 record in one-score conference games (during the regular season) and were a perfect 12-0 in one-score games not involving each other. At the other end of the spectrum, Clemson and Florida State under-performed relative to their expected record and for Florida State, the reason was their close game performance. The Seminoles finished 1-4 in close ACC contests. However, for Clemson, nothing really stands out. The Tigers were not terrible in close games (2-2 record in the ACC) and their in-conference turnover margin was middle of the pack (+1). Nothing really stands out as to why the Tigers under-performed...other than head coach Tommy Bowden.

I only have YPP data for three full seasons of the Tommy Bowden era (2005-2007). In all three of those seasons, the Tigers finished no worse than third in the ACC in Net YPP and twice finished as the top team in the Atlantic Division. However, the Tigers never won the Atlantic and posted a rather middling 14-10 conference record in that span.

It probably won't surprise you to know that Clemson finished that three-year run with the worst average difference between their actual record and their expected record.

For reference, under-performing by .128 percentage points equates to about one full game over an eight-game conference slate. Think an extra win in either 2005, 2006, 2007 would have come in handy? Spoiler. It would. The Tigers finished a game back in the Atlantic each season. Thanks to that under-performance and a slow start in 2008, the Tigers canned Tommy Bowden. I suppose you can argue that things have worked out pretty well since then. In a nice coincidence, I actually attended the last game Tommy Bowden coached at Clemson. It ended up being a defensive battle (or clash of offensive ineptitude depending on your point of view) and looked a lot like the 2006 ACC Championship Game, which segues nicely into...

The Lowest Scoring Conference Title Games
The 2006 ACC Championship Game did not have any real national ramifications. Wake Forest entered the game ranked 16th in the AP Poll and Georgia Tech was barely holding on at 23rd. A slot in the Orange Bowl was up for grabs, but with the game kicking off at Noon in Jacksonville, most college football fans were probably only halfway paying attention. And once the game started, you couldn't really blame them. There was nary an offensive touchdown scored in the game, with Wake Forest outlasting Georgia Tech behind three Sam Swank field goals. Until 2018, this result stood as the lowest scoring conference championship game in FBS history.

It was undercut by the 2018 Pac-12 Championship Game in terms of total points, but Wake still has the distinction of being the lowest scoring winner of a conference title game. While this game rightly made the ACC and its nascent championship game a punch line for a few years, I was never prouder to be a Demon Deacon.

Thanks for reading. Next week, we'll look at YPP from 2007 in the Western Athletic Conference. If there is a conference you want to see examined via YPP or APR, let me know in the comments.