2023 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 2023 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.

Alabama and Ole Miss significantly exceeded their APR. The Crimson Tide and Rebels also overachieved relative to their YPP numbers and we went over some reasons for that last week. 

Dominated by Your Conference Opponents

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about Georgia's dominant 2021 run through the SEC. The Bulldogs became just the eighteenth team in the BCS/College Football Playoff era (since 1998) to finish unbeaten in conference play and have all those wins come by double digits. The Bulldogs famously went on to lose to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game (they were not the first dominant team to lose their conference title game), but won the rematch against the Crimson Tide to capture their first national title in forty years. Were that post on Georgia a coin, this would be the flip side. In a nice bit of symmetry, in 2023, Vanderbilt became the eighteenth team in the BCS/College Football Playoff era to lose all their conference games and have all those losses come by double digits. Let's celebrate some futility!

Before we get to the Commodores and their ilk, let's look at the nine non-BCS/Group of Five teams that fit the aforementioned criteria. The nine teams are listed chronologically in the table below. The table also includes the conference they played in, their Margin of Defeat (MOD) in league play, their conference record, the closest they came to winning a conference game, and their head coach. 

The first thing that sticks out to me regarding this list is the number of (somewhat) successful coaches on it. While he was a failure as a head coach, Vic Koenning was a good defensive coordinator at Clemson and Illinois. However, he won just a single conference game during his stint in Laramie. George O'Leary engineered (see what I did there?) a top ten finish at Georgia Tech and won or shared four league titles at UCF before the wheels fell off during his final season. Bob Davie won nine games twice at Notre Dame and actually took New Mexico to consecutive bowl games before his tenure soured. Butch Davis nearly won a national title at Miami, contributed to the academic standing of North Carolina, and went to three straight bowl games at FIU (and also beat Miami) before losing his last thirteen conference games. The two MAC coaches on this list (Mike Neu and Scott Loeffler) are still at their respective schools. Neu even won a conference title at Ball State and Loeffler has taken Bowling Green to consecutive bowl games. I suppose the lesson here is that if you are going to put up an historically awful season, make sure it comes early in your tenure. 

Now let's look at the nine BCS/Power Five schools that have been dominated by their conference foes. 

There are significantly fewer successful coaches on this list. Kevin Steele is probably more famous for getting jacked up by Kevin Greene when was an assistant coach for the Carolina Panthers and for somehow being a finalist for the Auburn head coaching job in 2020. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and the Tigers hired Bryan Harsin, who I am assume is still in charge and enjoying great success. Anyway, back to Steele. He did something Clark Lea hopes to avoid in that he appears on this list twice, in back-to-back seasons! Baylor also dropped all their conference games in Steele's third season (2001), but they did manage to lose one of those games by six points to avoid the trifecta. Steele finally won his first and only conference game at Baylor in 2002 when the Bears beat Kansas. Between 1998 and 2002, Baylor lost 29 consecutive Big 12 games! Suddenly Dave Aranda doesn't seem so bad. The only coaches from this list that I think you can classify as successful are Dan McCarney and Ron Zook. McCarney's career record is not great, but he took Iowa State to five bowl games. Weirdly enough, this ineffective winless season is sandwiched between three bowl games in the immediate past (2000-2002) and two in the immediate future (2004-2005). Ron Zook is probably not what you picture when you think of successful college coaches, but he did have a decent (albeit disappointing) record at Florida and he took Illinois to a Rose Bowl. The other coaches on this list are mostly trash, with the exception of Paul Wulff who had a successful FCS career and the subject of this post, Clark Lea. If Lea knows any domesticated super fowl, I'm sure they often tell him that he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. Its not easy to win at Vanderbilt and it certainly is not getting any easier with the SEC's addition of Oklahoma and Texas. Lea's goals should be to avoid reappearing on this list and following in the footsteps of his predecessor by finding a defensive coordinator position and then becoming the head coach of a Group of Five program with some potential.