2025 Yards Per Play: Mountain West

This week we head west and examine a conference that will be undergoing some massive membership changes in 2026, the Mountain West. 

Here are the 2025 Mountain West 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 Mountain West 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 the Mountain West met this threshold? Here are Mountain West teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

Air Force significantly exceeded their expected record based on Yards Per Play while San Jose State underachieved relative to their down to down performance. Air Force fielded one of the worst in-conference per-play defenses I’ve tracked. There was some improvement in the second half of league play—coinciding with all of their wins—but the overall results remained underwhelming. Through their first four conference games, the Falcons allowed an alarming 8.72 yards per play. While that number dropped to 6.41 over the back half of the schedule, it still would have ranked just tenth across the full season. That putrid defensive performance through the first half of the conference season is the main reason why the Yards Per Play numbers are so skeptical of Air Force's record. The team finished 1-1 in one-score conference games and had a slightly negative turnover margin in conference play (-2). Meanwhile San Jose State's underachievement is simple to diagnose. The Spartans had the worst in-conference turnover margin (-8) in the Mountain West and that was especially pronounced over their four-game losing streak to close the season. In their first four conference games, the Spartans were a solid +4 in turnover margin. However, over their final four conference games, the Spartans were a turnover factory, posting a -12 margin in those four contests. In an unsurprising development, they lost all four of those games by double digits despite a respectable per play differential (-.33). 

Welcome to the Big Show

In our MAC posts the past two weeks, we discussed Sacramento State's expedited rise to FBS, but the bigger and more intriguing call up is happening in Fargo. The North Dakota State Bison, the best FCS team in the last decade and a half, is making the move to FBS. How quickly can the Bison acclimate to life in the FBS? One way to answer that query is to see how they have performed against FBS teams. Even casual college football fans know the Bison have beaten and scared numerous FBS teams during their run as an FCS power. The Bison transitioned from Division II and became an FCS team in 2004. They faced their first FBS opponent (Ball State) in 2006 and their first power conference opponent (Minnesota) also in 2006. The table below lists all fourteen of their games against FBS opponents, the result, their opponent's final record, and in some instances, an interesting fact about their opponent. The table is also color coded by their head coach. In their two plus decades as an FCS team, the Bison had four head coaches, three of which parlayed their success in Fargo to FBS head coaching positions (sometimes circuitously). 

To give additional context, here is their cumulative record versus different types of FBS opponents by head coach. 

You'll notice something happened to North Dakota State around the time of the first College Football Playoff. FBS teams stopped scheduling them. In the past eleven seasons (excluding 2020), the Bison have only faced four FBS opponents. Non-power FBS teams were running scared well before this time. Since 2009, the Bison have faced just one non-power FBS opponent (Colorado State). Unfortunately for their opponents, their are eleven FBS teams (all of the non-power variety) on the schedule in 2026, including the aforementioned Sacramento State Hornets. In addition, while the Bison have not beaten an FBS opponent in ten years, nearly all of their losses have been close (four of five have come by five points or fewer) and all have come on the road. The Bison will host five FBS opponents in 2026, as well as Fordham of the FCS. Their first game hosting an FBS opponent will come in Week Zero when Jacksonville State visits the Fargodome. Their was nothing left for the Bison to accomplish at the FCS level. I'm glad they finally decided to make the move and were able to settle in to a geographically sensible conference. I expect the Bison to be one of the better teams in the Mountain West and would not be shocked to see them in the College Football Playoff in the next few years.