2025 Yards Per Play: Conference USA

Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Hopefully you gleamed some good nuggets of advice to use when filling out your bracket last week. But its back to football around these parts until next March. What happened in Conference USA in 2025?

Here are the 2025 Conference USA standings. 

So we know what each team achieved, but how did they perform? To answer that, here are the Yards Per Play (YPP), Yards Per Play Allowed (YPA) and Net Yards Per Play (Net) numbers for each Conference USA team. This includes conference play only with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

College football teams play either eight or nine conference games. Consequently, their record in such a small sample may not be indicative of their quality of play. A few fortuitous bounces here or there can be the difference between another ho-hum campaign or a special season. Randomness and other factors outside of our perception play a role in determining the standings. It would be fantastic if college football teams played 100 or even 1000 games. Then we could have a better idea about which teams were really the best. Alas, players would miss too much class time, their bodies would be battered beyond recognition, and I would never leave the couch. As it is, we have to make do with the handful of games teams do play. In those games, we can learn a lot from a team’s YPP. Since 2005, I have collected YPP data for every conference. I use conference games only because teams play such divergent non-conference schedules and the teams within a conference tend to be of similar quality. By running a regression analysis between a team’s Net YPP (the difference between their Yards Per Play and Yards Per Play Allowed) and their conference winning percentage, we can see if Net YPP is a decent predictor of a team’s record. Spoiler alert. It is. For the statistically inclined, the correlation coefficient between a team’s Net YPP in conference play and their conference record is around .66. Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2025 season, which teams in Conference USA met this threshold? Here are Conference USA teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

The Conference USA standings were wildly different from the YPP rankings. The top team. by YPP (Liberty) finished with a losing record, while the teams ranked fourth (Kennesaw State) and sixth (Jacksonville State) played for the conference title. All together, three teams significantly exceeded their expected record based on YPP while three significantly underachieved. Jacksonville State, Kennesaw State, and Western Kentucky all significantly exceeded their expect record. The reason is pretty simple. The trio combined to finish 11-2 in one-score conference games (10-1 in games not involving each other). At the other end of the spectrum, Liberty, Middle Tennessee State, and UTEP significantly underachieved relative to their YPP numbers. And once again, close game performance is the culprit. The Flames, Blue Raiders, and Miners combined to finish 2-10 in one-score conference games. With close games playing such a major role in the conference race, I would expect the final 2026 standings to look significantly different. 

Where Have the FCS Wins Gone?

The recent rampant changes in college football (NIL, transfer portal, and the House settlement) have changed the power structure of the sport. The blue bloods can no longer hoard all the available talent and former also-rans that make good hires and spend some money, can win national titles. At least at the power conference level. There seems to be parity within the four power conferences, but the gulf between the power conferences and the Group of Five (soon to be Group of Six) appears to have widened. The three Group of Five schools that have made the expanded College Football Playoff have lost by a combined 65 points in their postseason games. In addition, the gulf between FBS and FCS seems to have become a chasm. For example, in 2025, there were only four FCS over FBS upsets. In chronological order, they were: Tarleton State over Army, Austin Peay over Middle Tennessee State, Bryant over Massachusetts, and Long Island over Eastern Michigan. One item that jumps out from those four games, is that none involved a power conference team. This marked the second year in a row no FCS teams beat power conference FBS teams. The last three seasons, which coincide with the major changes we outlined above, have resulted in a dearth of FCS over FBS upsets. 

To put the scarcity of upsets in perspective, I went back to 2005 and looked at all FCS over FBS as well as FCS over power conference wins. Since 2005 was exactly twenty years before 2025, I also grouped each five year interval together to give a baseline of expected FCS wins. I left off 2020 since we did not get a normal sample of FBS versus FCS games as many FCS teams waited until the spring to play their season. 

2005-2009 saw the fewest total FCS upsets in our grouping, but forty percent of those victories came against power conference teams. 

2013 was the biggest year on record, with an astounding sixteen FCS over FBS upsets. In this five year period, thirty percent of the upsets came against power conference teams. 

FCS victories continued unabated into Covid, with an incredible five power conference teams going down in 2016. 

FCS teams came out strong post-Covid, but as the monumental changes took effect later in the 2020s, those wins dried up. I would expect a similar showing in 2026, with FCS teams eking out a handful of upsets, but struggling to pull off any wins against power conference opponents.