2024 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: SEC

Last week we looked at how SEC 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 SEC 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, SEC 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 significantly over or underachieved relative to their APR. By that standard, Missouri significantly exceeded their APR while Mississippi State underachieved. Missouri also overachieved relative to their expected record based on Yards Per Play and we went over some reasons for that last week. Mississippi State cannot blame a poor record in close games for their underachievement (as we'll discuss in a moment). They did have a poor in-conference turnover margin (-6) and were unable to get teams off the field on fourth down. Conference opponents only had eleven fourth down attempts against the Bulldogs, but they converted on nine of them. 

Dominated by Conference Opponents

There was some bad football played in the Magnolia State in 2024. Two teams, Mississippi State, and Southern Miss finished winless in conference play with each of their losses coming by double digits, joining a rather ignominious club. We'll discuss the Bulldogs this week and transition to the Golden Eagles next week when we look at the Sun Belt. 

In one of last year's SEC recaps, we touched on teams that went winless in conference play while losing all their games by double digits. The Bulldogs are the tenth power conference team in the BCS/CFP era to 'accomplish' the feat. The Bulldogs finished 0-8, with their average margin of defeat coming by 17.75 points, and their closest loss was by ten points. Feel free to read last year's post to see how they compare to the other nine teams. I, of course, am more concerned about how they will perform in 2025. The table below lists the previous nine teams and how they fared in the season following their noncompetitive conference season. 

In the aggregate, the teams improved although they still tended to be quite bad, winning just a fifth of their conference games in the follow up season. Seven of the nine teams improved and four of nine improved by at least two wins. 

You may have noticed a few asterisks in the previous table. Teams with one asterisk had the same coach in both seasons and teams with two asterisks had the same coach in both seasons with both seasons representing the first two seasons the coach was with the team. Both of those situations apply to Mississippi State. 2024 marked Jeff Lebby's first season as head coach in Starkville and barring some Hugh Freeze levels of indiscretion this summer, he should be the head coach of the Bulldogs in 2025. For teams that held onto their coach after a bad season, the results are similar to the aggregate results for all teams.

Seven teams kept their coach despite seeing their team finish winless in conference play with each loss coming by double digits. Five of the seven teams improved though they were still quite bad in the aggregate. 

The bad news for Mississippi State is that the two teams that finished winless in conference play with all their losses coming by double digits under first year head coaches did not show much improvement at all in their second year. 

The sample size is quite small (Kevin Steele at Baylor in 1999 and Ron Zook at Illinois in 2005), but those two teams improved by just a single win the following season. Baylor went winless again at the turn of the millennium and Illinois managed just a single conference win in 2006. Mississippi State plays in the arguably the nation's toughest conference, so the deck is stacked against them when it comes to improving in 2025.