2024 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Conference USA

Last week we looked at how Conference USA 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 Conference USA 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, Conference USA 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 for determining which teams over or underachieved according to their APR. By that standard, Florida International was the only team that saw their actual record differ significantly from their APR. The Panthers also underachieved relative to their Yards Per Play numbers and we went over some reasons for that last week. 

Champ Vs Champ

Thanks to the expanded College Football Playoff format (byes for the four highest rated conference champions), there was only one bowl game in 2024 that featured two outright conference champions. The Cure Bowl brought together the MAC champion (Ohio) and Conference USA champion (Jacksonville State) in beautiful Orlando, Florida. In the BCS/CFP era (since 1998), 55 bowl games have been contested between outright conference champions. 13 different bowl have hosted these games. They are listed below along with the number of instances and the most recent occurrence. 

It's no surprise the four original BCS bowl games plus the BCS Championship Game have seen the most outright champion matchups. The BCS Championship Game was around for eight seasons (2006-2013), but twice did not feature two outright conference champions. The first came in 2011, when LSU and Alabama staged their Game of The Century rematch and the second came the following year when Independent Notre Dame qualified for the title game. Back in the early days of the BCS, the Liberty Bowl served as a showcase for non-BCS champions, pitting so-called mid-major champions against one another in 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2004. Seven of those eight mid-major champions entered the game ranked in the AP Poll. The Cure Bowl may end up serving as the mid-major showcase in the new world of college football, having hosted a pair of outright mid-major champs in both 2022 and 2024. If you remembered the Arizona, GMAC/Go Daddy, and Poinsettia Bowls existed, much less hosted two outright conference champions, give yourself a hand. 

Before we close, I wanted to mention the year 1998. Thus far, that is the only season in the BCS/CFP era that did not feature a single matchup between outright conference champions. This was mostly due to the three-way tie atop the Big 10 and two-way tie atop the ACC. With no championship games in those leagues, the split titles ensured there was no true champ versus champ bowl game. Since then though, we are currently riding a 26-year streak of at least one champ versus champ matchup in the postseason.