2024 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 2024 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.

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 somewhat arbitrary standard to determine if any teams significantly overachieved or underachieved relative to their APR. By that standard, Michigan State overachieved while Southern Cal and Wisconsin underachieved. Michigan State was not particularly fortunate in close games (2-1 record in one-score Big 10 games), but the Spartans were blown out in nearly all of their conference defeats. Five of their six Big 10 losses came by at least 20 points. Meanwhile, Southern Cal was quite unlucky in their close game performance. The Trojans finished 2-5 in one-score Big 10 games, with all of their losses coming by a touchdown or less and three coming by a field goal or less. Wisconsin is a little tougher to get a read on as the Badgers were 0-1 in close games, but scored more touchdowns that they allowed despite winning just a third of their Big 10 games. Wisconsin really ran up the score against Purdue and Rutgers, beating the Boilermakers and Scarlet Knights by a combined 81 points and artificially inflating their APR. 

Indiana and Dramatic Improvements in Conference Record

Curt Cignetti certainly has some bluster. During a press conference shortly after his hiring, Cignetti famously said: It's pretty simple. I win. Google me. Cignetti made good on that drunken boast by winning eleven games and guiding the Hoosiers to the expanded College Football Playoff. In conference play, Indiana improved their conference record by an incredible seven games, going from 1-8 to 8-1. What are reasonable expectations after such an immense improvement? To answer that question, I looked at all BCS/Power conference teams that improved their conference record by more than .500 from one season to the next. Between 1998 and 2023, 25 teams (roughly one per season) accomplished this feat, making it much more common than I anticipated. Those teams are listed chronologically in the table below. 

Auburn, in Gus Malzahn's first season on The Plains took the biggest leap, improving by an incredible .875 in going from zero SEC wins to seven. That Auburn team and five others have an asterisk by their name as they were led by first year coaches, much like Indiana was in 2024. We'll get back to that in a moment. In the meantime, the cumulative improvement of those 25 teams is summarized below. 

So what are reasonable expectations for Indiana in 2025? Well, lets look to the past. How did those other 25 teams perform the next season after making big strides?

In the aggregate, they declined in conference winning percentage by nearly .250! That's roughly two wins over an eight game conference schedule or two and a quarter wins over a nine game schedule (as the Hoosiers play in the Big 10). 18 of the 25 teams (72%) saw their conference win percentage decline while only 3 of 25 (12%) further improved their conference win percentage. 

Indiana was not the only Power conference team that improved significantly from 2023 to 2024. A trio of Big 12 teams also improved their fortunes substantially. 

Arizona State won the Big 12 and, like Indiana, made the expanded College Football Playoff. BYU and Colorado didn't reach those heights, but they came oh so close, finishing tied with the Sun Devils and Iowa State Cyclones atop the Big 12 standings. Inquisitive readers (if any) may be wondering why I did not save this post for the Big 12 YPP and APR recaps. Simple. Those three teams were not led by a first year coach. Kenny Dillingham and Coach Prime were in their second seasons at Arizona State and Colorado respectively, while Kalani Sitake somehow just finished his ninth season at BYU. Do first year head coaches that drastically improve their teams' fortunes fare differently in their follow up campaigns? The answer may surprise you. 

Unfortunately, our sample size is quite small (six coaches), but the results are not far off from the aggregate of all coaches that significantly improved their teams' conference record. Those six coaches lost about .227 in conference winning percentage the next season (compared to .247 for all coaches regardless of tenure). Five of six saw their conference record decline the following season with only Urban Meyer at Ohio State maintaining his a perfect league mark in his second season. 

If we use history as our guide, Indiana fans should expect to win about five or six conference games in 2025. That probably won't be enough to get them into the College Football Playoff, but consecutive winning Big 10 records is something that has happened just three times at Indiana in the past 60 years!