2023 Yards Per Play: Big 12

Before we get started this week, I wanted to take a moment to mention the passing of legendary college basketball coach Lefty Driesell. For the unfamiliar, Lefty was a favorite coach of mine and the inspiration for both my old AIM screen name and the address of this blog. Obviously, as a naive 23 year old, SEO optimization did not enter my mind. Before he retired, I was able to see Lefty coach in person at the Charlotte Coliseum in December 2001. Hard to believe that was nearly a quarter century ago, but time keeps rolling along. But enough about me, lets get to why you came here in the first place, a look back the Big 12. 

Here are the 2023 Big 12 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 Big 12 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 2023 season, which teams in the Big 12 met this threshold? Here are Big 12 teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

Conference championship game participant Oklahoma State (more on them later) significantly exceeded their expected record based on YPP while TCU and UCF underachieved relative to their YPP numbers. Oklahoma State was left for dead after a lackluster non-conference performance that included a close win at Arizona State and a blowout home loss to South Alabama. After a close loss to Iowa State to open conference play, it seemed like Mike Gundy might finally be on his way out in Stillwater. But the Cowboys won their next five conference games (with three coming by one-score) before getting waxed by UCF. At 5-2 and holding the tiebreaker over Oklahoma thanks to their head to head win in Bedlam, the Cowboys pulled off consecutive second half comebacks against Houston (trailed by 14 in the second quarter) and BYU (trailed by 18 at the half) to qualify for the Big 12 Championship Game. The Cowboys finished 4-1 in one-score conference games and had a decent turnover margin in Big 12 play (+4). Close games pushed the Cowboys to the pinnacle of the Big 12, but they kept TCU and UCF near the bottom of the league standings. One season after holding a horseshoe and four-leaf clover, TCU's good fortune flipped. The Horned Frogs finished 0-3 in one-score conference games (0-4 overall thanks to their opening loss to Colorado) and had the worst in-conference turnover margin in the Big 12 (-8). This kept them home for the holidays one season after they finished as the national runner up. UCF also fared poorly in one-score conference games, posting a 1-3 mark in such games. Their close game losses were especially tight, with two of the defeats coming by a single point and another coming by two points. 

Underwater in Championship Games

Doing away with divisions is probably a good thing for college football. I say probably because a team's geographic location should not arbitrarily make their path to the conference title game easier or nigh impossible (see the Big 10 for instance). However, doing away with divisions also ensures teams like Purdue, Duke, or Wake Forest will not be making conference title appearances for a very long time. Conferences obviously want their best teams to qualify for the championship game because it usually means a better game, more ticket sales, a higher television rating, and beginning in 2024, an opportunity to secure multiple CFP bids. But I'm an egalitarian (and a Wake Forest fan) so I think it rules when Purdue, Duke, or Wake randomly shows up on Championship Saturday. But I'm not here to argue for or against divisions. No, I'm here to point out a statistical anomaly. 

With unbalanced divisions, its easier for a (statistically) mediocre or bad team to qualify for the conference championship game. With an easy schedule, a few lucky bounces, a tiebreaker, and a small sample size (eight or nine game league schedule) a team that is statistically weak can finish ahead of six or seven other teams in a division. But without divisions, that same team would need to finish ahead of twice as many teams to qualify for the conference championship game. And that is exactly what Oklahoma State did in 2023. The Cowboys finished with a Net YPP of -0.27 and became just the second team to qualify for a conference championship game in a league without divisions with a negative Net YPP. The other team to do so also played in the Big 12. 

Division-less conferences have not been around for very long. By my count there have been 19 such seasons (see below), but the Big 10 and SEC are nixing divisions in 2024, meaning all the power conferences will be free-for-alls. The MAC also announced they will not have divisions in 2024, leaving the Sun Belt as the lone holdout. As leagues expand and divisions go away, I expect we will see fewer and fewer teams get to their respective conference title games with negative Net YPPs. Cherish Oklahoma State's 2023 accomplishment for its rarity!