2020 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Mountain West

Last week we looked at how Mountain West 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 Mountain West 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 (some played as many as eight or as few as four), the rankings are on a per game basis, not raw totals. 

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

I used a game and a half as an arbitrary line of demarcation to determine if a team significantly over or under-performed relative to their APR. By that standard, no team saw their actual record differ significantly from their APR.

Divisional Dominance

The Mountain West scrapped its divisional format for the 2020 campaign and emulated the Big 12 by sending the two teams with the best record to the conference title game. For the fourth year in a row, one of those participants was Boise State. While the Broncos ultimately fell to San Jose State in the Mountain West Championship Game, they continued to dominate their divisional brethren. The Broncos managed to play five regular season conference games in 2020 and four of those came against teams that normally play in the Mountain Division of the Mountain West (Air Force, Colorado State, Utah State, and Wyoming). The only Mountain Division member that avoided the Broncos was New Mexico. The Broncos won all four of those games with relative ease and in the process ran their divisional win streak to 19 games. In 2016, the Broncos actually lost back to back games against Mountain Division teams, dropping a classic in Laramie to eventual division champs Wyoming and their regular season finale to Air Force. In the four seasons since, the Broncos have lost four times to Mountain West teams (with two coming in the conference title game), but all those losses have come against teams that play in the West Division (Fresno State twice, San Diego State, and San Jose State). How does this divisional win streak compare to Group of Five teams? Pretty favorably. 

The Broncos own the longest divisional win streak among Group of Five teams. and they will have a chance to make it an even twenty when they travel to Utah State on September 25th.