We begin our offseason recaps with the American Athletic Conference.
Here are the 2020 AAC 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 AAC team. This includes conference play only, with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.
College football teams play either eight or nine conference games (typically fewer in 2020). 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 2020 season, which teams in the AAC met this threshold? Here are AAC teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.
Dana's Bowl Struggles
Are there legitimate excuses for some of those egg-layings? Certainly. In 2017, his quarterback, Will Grier, was injured in the penultimate game of the regular season and missed the bowl. In 2018, many of his best players opted out of the bowl game against Syracuse. However, taken together this is a pretty strong indictment of Holgorsen's prowess to motivate and prepare his team for bowl games. Keep this in mind next December when Houston is laying points against a team they are vastly superior to on paper.
Tulsa and South Florida were the two teams that saw their expected record differ significantly from their actual record. The Golden Hurricane exceeded their expected record thanks to an unblemished close game record (4-0) in one-score conference games and a phenomenal performance in the second half of games. Meanwhile, South Florida finished winless in AAC play despite poor, but hardly horrendous numbers. The Bulls were 0-2 in one-score conference games and finished with the worst in-conference turnover margin (-7).
Dana's Bowl Struggles
Return with me to a simpler time. It was early January 2012. The nation was distraught that a pair of SEC teams would stage a rematch for the national title. But before that game in New Orleans, there would be an appetizer of sorts in the Orange Bowl. A young, mulleted, Red Bull chugging, offensive savant would lead West Virginia against a Clemson team that had been ranked as high as number six earlier in the season. The Mountaineers finished in a three-way tie for first in the Big East, but captured the penultimate Big East title and subsequent BCS bid thanks to owning the highest BCS ranking in the conference. West Virginia entered the game a slight underdog, but between the beginning of the second quarter and late in the third, the Mountaineers outscored the Tigers 49-3 en route to an easy 70-33 win. For Clemson, the loss likely set them on a path to win the national title as they fired Kevin Steele after the game and hired Brent Venables away from Oklahoma. For West Virginia, the victory propelled them into the national conscience. After middling preseason respect post Rich Rodriguez, the Mountaineers entered the 2012 season ranked eleventh in the AP Poll and rose as high as number five before their defensive issues were fully exposed in a 7-6 campaign. Over Dana Holgorsen's final seven seasons in Morgantown, the Mountaineers never really realized the expectations they set after the scintillating Orange Bowl performance. In Big 12 play, Holgorsen managed a winning record (33-30), but the Mountaineers only finished in the final AP Poll twice, and never higher than eighteenth. The primary reason for that? A deplorable bowl performance. And if you tuned in to college football on Christmas Eve, that trend continued at his new stop in Houston.
Since winning that Orange Bowl nine years ago, Holgorsen's teams have lost six of seven bowl games and have not covered in any. Five of those losses, including the past four have all come by at least two touchdowns and West Virginia's only bowl win outside of the beatdown of Clemson came by a single point. Here is the carnage in table form.
No comments:
Post a Comment