2020 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Big 10

Last week we looked at how Big 10 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 2020 Big 10 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. Since teams played a varied number of games (everyone played at least five and a few played a full nine game schedule), the rankings are on a per game basis, not raw totals. 

Finally, Big 10 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. Using that standard, Wisconsin was the lone team that saw their record differ significantly from their APR. The Badgers played six conference games and won half of them, but two of their victories (the first two) came by 38 points apiece and gave the impression the Badgers were an elite team. Huge margins of victory, particularly in a smaller than normal conference season, can really skew how a team rates in APR. 

Bert is Back in the Big 10

You may have missed it if you don't follow Illinois football (and why would you?), but the Illini will have a new football coach in 2021. Illinois replaced a one-time Super Bowl losing coach with a two-time Rose Bowl losing coach when they hired Bret Bielema. Bert as he is affectionately known, coached Wisconsin for seven seasons following Barry Alvarez's retirement. His tenure was very successful with three Big 10 titles, five ranked finishes, and an average of nearly ten wins per season. His Big 10 background and success makes him an obvious homerun hire for Illinois right? Well, if you look at the past three Wisconsin coaches, it sure seems like the culture surrounding the program was the primary reason for the success other than any greatness inherent in the head coach. 

We'll circle back to Bielema in a moment, but let's start with his replacement, Gary Andersen. Andersen was the head coach at Wisconsin for just two season, but in that time he led the Badgers to nineteen victories and one division championship. Following his abrupt departure, he headed to Corvallis, Oregon and coached the Oregon State Beavers for two and a half seasons, where his teams won just seven games. He resigned from Oregon State and after a little more than a year, returned to where his FBS head coaching career began, Utah State. Andersen took over a Utah State team that had finished in the top twenty-five the previous season, with a future first round pick at quarterback, and led them to a 7-6 record. In his second season back at Utah State, his team began the year 0-3 with each loss coming by at least three touchdowns and Andersen again resigned. At Wisconsin, his teams went 13-3 in Big 10 play. Since leaving Wisconsin, his teams won nine conference games over parts of five seasons.

This analysis is not completely fair to Andersen as he did lead Utah State to a pair of bowl games in his original tenure. Let's give him credit for those four seasons.

When we include his first run in Logan, his career numbers look a little better, but its important to remember context. When Andersen had his greatest success at Utah State, the WAC was imploding. Boise State left the WAC for the Mountain West after the 2010 season, with Fresno State, Hawaii, and Nevada following after the 2011. In 2012, Utah State was in a conference with two teams that had good seasons (Louisiana Tech and San Jose State), two of the worst teams in FBS (Idaho and New Mexico State), and two FBS newcomers (Texas-San Antonio and Texas State). 

When Andersen left for Corvallis, Wisconsin hired Pittsburgh head coach Paul Chryst. Chryst's teams in the Steel City had been middling, posting a 19-19 overall record as they closed out the Big East and joined the ACC. However, upon arriving in Madison, the Badgers continued to be one of the best teams in the conference outside of Ohio State. In six seasons under Chryst, Wisconsin has won at least ten games four times, played in the Big 10 Championship Game three times, and averaged nearly ten wins per year. In conference play, the Badgers have lost as many games in six seasons under Chryst as the Panthers did in three seasons. 

Now lets return to Bielema. He has not been out of coaching since 2012. After leaving Wisconsin, he became head coach of Arkansas. While his overall record at Arkansas was mediocre (29-34) and while he guided the Hogs to three bowl games in five seasons, he did not do what he was ostensibly paid for; beat fellow SEC opponents. 

Bielema's best squad (at least based on the advanced metrics) was probably his 2014 team which managed a 2-6 conference record. His team did finish with a winning conference record in 2015 (and famously denied Ole Miss their shot at an SEC crown), but that same team also lost to Texas Tech and Toledo in non-conference play. Outside of that 5-3 finish, his teams averaged 1.5 conference wins per season. Bielema's new division, the Big 10 West, is nowhere near as brutal as the SEC West and Bielema won't have to deal with Alabama, Auburn, LSU, and Texas A&M on an annual basis, but Illinois will begin his tenure at the bottom of the division hierarchy. Iowa and Wisconsin are the stalwart front runners, Northwestern is the nerd school that annually overachieves, and Minnesota, Nebraska, and Purdue have all hired young promising coaches in the past few years (though success at their current locations has been mixed). Illinois replaced a failed retread (who took them to a bowl a little more than a year ago I might add) with another failed retread who happened to have Big 10 roots. And his success at his previous Big 10 job (now nearly a decade in the past) appears to have had more to do with the program itself than anything Bielema did. Perhaps Bielema will be a success at Illinois, I've been wrong a time or two before. However, this hire was lazy. Instead of hiring a coach that succeeded at an easy job and failed at a hard one, maybe take a shot on a coach that just led Kent State to back to back winning seasons? Casual college football fans and less plugged in alums may not have known who he was, but he would have been a better choice.