Another regular season is in the books. Victories have been won and defeats have been suffered. The wheat, as they say, has been separated from the chaff. So we can now look back and try to gauge which teams performed up to expectations, which ones exceeded expectations, and which ones, well, just shit the bed.

But how do we evaluate a season? How do we know if someone met expectations? In some cases, the old eyeball test works just fine. I mean, it’s pretty easy to look at a team like TAMU (Whoop!), with all that 5-star talent, and say ‘WTF?’. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we would all pretty much agree that Arizona exceeded expectations. Good shit, Jed!

At some point, though, it would also be nice to be able to do this in a more systematic manner across a large number of teams, make comparisons, and maybe even try to see ‘how much’ a team surpassed or fell short of expectations If you’re still reading, I’m guessing you feel the same way.

My plan is simple. I want to look at how well ‘team talent’ corresponds to performance. As the title suggests, I want to know who gets more with less, who gets less with more, and maybe laugh at Florida along the way.

As an added bonus, we can look at these data and maybe see which coaches should be climbing the ladder and which ones should never be paid to coach football ever again. 

247 TEAM TALENT COMPOSITE

Before ‘Buy Bushwood’ (😊) jumps into this diary to tell me how ‘talent’ is such a flawed term, I’m going to preempt and acknowledge his general point. Talent is very difficult to measure, involving both tangibles and intangibles, observables and unobservables. It reminds me of the old joke about Robert McNamara feeding all sorts of observable data (kill ratios, ordinance expended, bridges destroyed, etc.) into a supercomputer in the Pentagon basement in 1967 and asking it when the US would win in Vietnam. The computer’s answer?  You won this war in 1965. (Resolve matters, but isn’t easily quantifiable.)

Nonetheless, we have a standard measure of ‘talent’ that actually does pretty well at identifying things like, say, NFL draft success. The 247 Team Talent Composite provides a team-wide composite measure of each current player's recruiting rating, accounting for transfers (in and out). It’s not perfect. I’m not saying it’s perfect. But it works fairly well.

FEI’s EXPECTED WIN DIFFERENTIAL

Throughout the season, FEI tracks a team’s win differential relative to three different baseline (hypothetical) teams: an elite team, a good team, and an average team. These are defined as follows:

• Elite teams have an FEI score 2 standard deviations above the mean FEI
• Good teams have an FEI score 1 standard deviation above the mean FEI
• Average teams have an FEI score equal to the average FEI.

A team’s win differential is defined as its number of wins compared to the number of wins that an elite/good/average team would be expected to have against the same schedule.

          wins - expected wins (elite/good/average team)

A positive win differential means that the team outperformed the expected win total of an elite/good/average team. Negative values mean they won fewer games than a hypothetical elite/good/average team. A value of zero means they matched the expectations of such a hypothetical team. 

THE GRAPHS

The first graph looks at every P5 team’s Team Talent Composite (y-axis) and FEI Win Differential relative to an ‘elite’ team (x-axis). The values along the x-axis are the number of team wins greater than or less than what would be expected from an elite team. Michigan, for example, won 1.3 more games than we would expect an elite team to win against Michigan’s schedule.

Dashed lines are the average team talent and win differential of all P5 schools. 

I have also shaded two areas of interests. “Elite’ talent teams are shaded in green (get it?). These are the teams with a talent composite ≥ 2 standard deviations above the mean talent composite. The red shaded area covers the teams with ‘elite’ results (a win differential greater than or equal to an ‘elite’ team). 

Unsurprisingly, the elite talent teams (‘Bama, Georgia, and OSU) all achieved elite results. But the teams with the 1st, 2nd, and 4th most elite results, Washington, Michigan, and Florida State, are significantly lower on the team talent composite. These are the teams that exceeded expectations.

Who would we say definitely fell below expectations? Unsurprisingly, Florida, Miami, and TAMU would seem to fit the definition of under performers. TAMU in particular had nearly elite talent, but performed almost exactly as we would expect your average P5 team to perform. Clemson and USC are two other near-elite teams in terms of talent that barely performed above the P5 average. 

Comparisons to ‘elite’ teams might be a bit unfair, though. What happens if we look at win differentials relative to ‘good’ teams? 

I have again shaded two areas of interests. “Good’ talent teams, with a talent composite score ≥ 1s.d. above the average P5 team, are shaded in green. The red shaded area covers the teams with ‘good’ results (a win differential greater than or equal to a ‘good’ team).

As we would expect, quite a few more teams qualify as ‘good’. But once again, Washington leads the pack of over performers with a (nearly) average team talent score but 5 more wins than would be expected from a good team (a team with an FEI score 1s.d. above the mean). Florida State is up there again as well. 

The interesting thing about this graph, though, are the teams in the bottom-right quadrant. These are the ones with significantly less talent than the average P5 school, but that outperform (albeit only slightly) the expectations of a good team. Iowa, NC State, Arizona (good shit, Jed!) fit this bill. 

Once again, TAMU, Florida, Miami, Clemson, and USC underperformed relative to the amount of talent on their teams. One of these coaches has already been fired. Who's next? Is it unthinkable that Dabo's seat might be getting a bit warm?

Anything you find interesting? Any coaches do you think should be on the hot seat given these data? Any coaches you think should be moving up because they are doing more with less?

Thanks for reading. Go Blue!