2021 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Mountain West

Last week we looked at how Mountain West teams fared in terms of yards per play. his 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 2021 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.

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 use a game and a half as the standard to determine whether or not a team significantly over or under-performed. No team in the Mountain West met that threshold in 2021. 

The Decline of Boise State

The expression 'life comes at you fast' is a bit trite, but there is a lot of truth in that short statement. We often struggle to recognize gradual change until a significant amount of time has passed. For example, without looking it up, how long has it been since Boise State finished a season ranked in the top ten of the AP Poll? Five or six years right? Longer. Seven or eight? It was 2011. Barack Obama had not completed his first term as President the last time Boise State was considered by the college football media to be among the nation's elite. The Broncos have not exactly been wondering in the wilderness for the past eleven seasons, but their national profile has dimmed and that coincided with the departure of Chris Petersen to Washington. Petersen coached the Broncos for eight seasons (2006-2013) and in an interesting bit of symmetry, the Broncos have been without Petersen for the past eight seasons (2014-2021) and sort of 'became' Boise State in the eight seasons preceding his ascendance to head coach (1998-2005). 

Boise State played their first game as an FBS program on August 31st 1996. They lost to Central Michigan. The Broncos would win just two games in that inaugural season. They followed that up with another losing campaign in 1997, but have reeled off 24 consecutive winning seasons since. As I mentioned earlier, that 24 year run neatly sandwiches their greatest success under Chris Petersen between two pretty good runs under four other coaches. So let's do a little comparison. Here is the conference record Boise State posted during each eight year span along with their number of conference titles, both outright and shared. 

Between 1998 and 2005, the Broncos won nearly 88% of their conference games with five outright league titles and a shared title in 2005. When the Big West folded following the 2000 season, the Broncos did not miss a beat in their new home, the WAC, winning 23 of 24 conference games between 2002 and 2005. Following the 2005 season, head coach Dan Hawkins took the Colorado job and his offensive coordinator, Chris Petersen, was promoted to head coach. And the Broncos kept on winning. During Petersen's eight years in charge, they upped their conference winning percentage ever so slightly to nearly 91%. However, they won fewer conference titles, both outright (3) and shared (2) thanks to generational teams at Hawaii (2007) and Nevada (2010) and the move to a stronger conference (the Mountain West in 2011). Once Petersen departed, Bryan Harsin was plucked from Arkansas State to lead the team. Under Harsin and his successor Andy Avalos, the Broncos have continued to dominate their conference brethren. They have won 82% of their Mountain West games and claimed the conference title outright 3 times with two other appearances in the league title game. In fact, they made four consecutive conference title appearances between 2017 and 2020. So if the Broncos are still winning conference games at a similar clip, why have they not finished in the top ten in more than a decade?

This is the biggest area where Boise State has fallen off. Under Dirk Koetter and Dan Hawkins, the Broncos dominated their conference opponents, but were unable to score any major non-conference victories. Between 1998 and 2005, they beat two teams from BCS conferences. They beat an Iowa State team that finished 7-7 in the 2002 Humanitarian Bowl and Oregon State in 2004. Their two wins against ranked teams in that span came against Fresno State in 2001 and TCU in the 2003 Fort Worth Bowl. Under Petersen, the Broncos more than quadrupled their win total against BCS conference teams, winning games against Georgia, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Virginia Tech to name a few. They also won twice as many games as they lost against ranked teams, knocking off two top ten teams (Oklahoma and TCU) in the process. While the Broncos have held their own against Power Five teams since Petersen left, they have not scored any genre defining wins. Of their seven victories against Power Five opponents, three have come against teams that finished with losing records (most recently Florida State in 2019) and only one has come against a team that finished the season ranked in the final AP Poll (Arizona). And speaking of ranked teams, while they have beaten seven ranked teams, six of them have been fellow Group of Five members (BYU, Fresno State thrice, San Diego State, and Utah State). The college football viewing public does pay as much attention when Group of Five teams cannibalize their own. 

If the Broncos want to resume their place at the top of the Group of Five food chain in the college football ecosystem, they need to start winning more games against better Power Five opponents. Alas, the 2022 schedule does not really present any opportunities for such a feat. The lone Power Five opponent on the schedule is Oregon State, a bowl team from last season, but an unlikely true contender in the Pac-12. The Broncos do host a future Power Five opponent, BYU, but the 2022 team will at best have a sterling final record with few chances to wow the nation in non-conference action.