2021 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Sun Belt

Last week we looked at how Sun Belt 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 Sun Belt 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, Sun Belt 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 somewhat arbitrary standard to determine whether a team's record differed significantly from their APR. By that standard, South Alabama was the only team with a record that was significantly off from their APR. The Jaguars significantly underachieved relative to their APR and they also underachieved relative to their Yards Per Play numbers and we went over a few reasons for that last week.  

Dominating Your Division

Billy Napier had a pretty successful four-year run at Louisiana-Lafayette. The Ragin' Cajuns finished ranked in the AP Poll the past two seasons after never having appeared in the poll in their history. However, Napier's most impressive achievement may have been that he never lost to a division opponent. The Sun Belt switched to a divisional format in 2018 and in the four years since, Louisiana-Lafayette has gone 16-0 against their opponents in the West. 

The Ragin' Cajuns won those sixteen games by nearly fifteen points per game and averaged nearly a yard and a half more per play than their opponents. Perhaps even more impressive is that fact that no other team in the West posted a winning division record in that span. 

And while the East has been the stronger division in the early days of this new Sun Belt iteration, Louisiana-Lafayette has held their own when they step outside the friendly confines of the West. 

The Ragin' Cajuns went 1-3 against East division opponents in Napier's first season, but they are 10-2 since and their overall point and per play differential emphasize this strong showing. In fact, they are the only team from the West to have any success in inter-division play. 

The other West teams all have losing records against the East and that quartet has combined to win less than a quarter of their inter-division games.

Louisiana-Lafayette's amazing division streak is likely to end this season due to simple regression and the reorganization of the Sun Belt. And Billy Napier's personal division streak seems destined to end in Jacksonville if not before, but take a moment to genuflect on some unappreciated dominance at the lower levels of FBS. 

We have completed our offeason run through all ten FBS conferences. Thanks as always for reading. This blog will continue to make posts throughout the summer, but they will be more sporadic. Look for a YPP Throwback on the 2001 Big 12, some posts on first half point differential from this past season, a Vegas betting trip, and maybe an NFL post. We are about twelve weeks from Week Zero, but if we maintain our focus, we can make it through the long offseason.