SMQ: A new approach to assessing college football’s Power Five divide

Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at the divide between college football’s Power Five. What if the real divide is not between but within each conference?

Sunday Morning Quarterback has used the month of November to investigate the divide between Power Five conferences in the space of where teams rank heading into conference championship games, where they fall on the spectrum of revenues and expenditures, and gaps between conferences on the recruiting trail.

What we find is that, while the eyeball test seems to indicate a growing divide between the haves (the SEC, the Big Ten, and tenuously the ACC) and the have-nots (the Pac-12, the Big 12, and perhaps the ACC), the numbers themselves do not bear out the accuracy of such a contention.

So that divide must fall elsewhere on the Power Five spectrum. Originally we were going to examine college football coaching in the context of this ongoing question. Instead, this week, we are going to change direction a little bit and break down the numbers in a different fashion.

Instead of trying to assess the relative positioning between conferences, it might benefit us more to look at the divide within Power Five conferences.

Ultimately, it might be this divide between the contenders and the pretenders in each individual Power Five conference that proves the greater gulf between teams that have a legitimate chance at national championships and those that are merely fodder on the annual schedule to pad the record.

The methodology for investigating the intraconference Power Five divide

Assessing strengths within conferences might rely on a different methodological approach than the previous approaches we have taken to assessing divides between conferences. For this, we are going to look at conference placement over the past five years and how teams have ranked within the conference in terms of revenue, expenditures, and recruiting rankings. As such, today’s investigation is non-parametric in nature as we normalize to a ranked count rather than working straight from the raw data.

That is because the intent of this week’s investigation is less about change over time than an ongoing development of a disparity between leagues. Thus we are going to look at expenditures and recruiting on a four-year average against conference placement. (2018 has not been included due to a lack of financial data for the most recently completed season.)

As we did in Part II of this study, the data for revenues and expenditures comes from the Department of Educations Equity in Athletics Data Analysis project. Information on recruiting data was culled from the 247sports team composite rankings for each season. Order of conference finish was taken from Sports Reference’s archive of conference standings.

For conferences split into two divisions, the teams have been ranked in the following order: the conference champion is ranked No. 1, the losing division champion is ranked No. 2, and then teams are ranked based on conference winning percentage. (Ties in conference record were broken by overall winning percentage. While in some cases there might have been a head-to-head win that would determine conference order, overall percentage allows us to track final performance more clearly.)

Working from this data, we can then assess to what extent those teams that lag in spending ability and recruiting quality have been able to transcend those limitations and where the gulf lies within each Power Five league.

First, let’s look at the full 12 years of the study

In three of the Power Five conferences, the top team in recruiting and expenditures met expectations and finished as the best team between 2006 and 2017. Alabama, USC, and Ohio State all spent and recruited like the top team in their respective leagues.

Even so, these three schools ended up winning a combined 15 out of a possible 36 conference titles over that span. The Buckeyes led the way with six championships in 12 seasons; Alabama racked up five SEC crowns, while USC finished with four over the span.

Spending alone cannot explain how a team finishes, nor does the talent a school brings in to play football on scholarship.

Before we go further, let’s talk a bit about what these numbers actually mean. The POS column indicates the average final standing for each team within their conference over the period of the study. The CMP column is a composite of how a team ranks within their conference in terms of recruiting and spending.

In between those two numbers, the VAR column illustrates how well a team performs on the field relative to how they spend and recruit. Higher numbers and darker green shading indicates a team overperformed relative to expectations; lower numbers and darker  red shading indicates a team underperformed to those same expectations.

Teams are included in all conferences where they competed over the 12-year time frame. That allows us to see how teams perform after a transition and whether a move worked out better or worse for a program.

Power Five teams that outperform expectations on the field

Let’s look first at those teams that perform better than expected given the talent they field and the money they can spend. These are the teams that consistently feature in the conference title race despite spending like a middleweight or a cellar-dweller.

One team stands out as an exemplar of overachievement. That is Missouri, which outperformed expectations in the Big 12 and has continued that trend since moving to the SEC. With their time spent evenly between the two leagues, this is not merely a matter of a small sample size skewing the numbers for one or the other league in question.

In terms of spending and recruiting, the Tigers ranked ninth out of the 14 teams that played in the Big 12 between 2006 and 2017. During their time in the Big 12, Missouri played for the conference title twice and never finished in the bottom half of the league. Only Oklahoma was more consistently good on the gridiron as the Tigers averaged a position in the standings seven spots higher than their spending and recruiting would lead one to expect.

After moving to the SEC in 2012, Missouri has continued to be an overachiever among their new rivals. Despite an influx in revenue after switching conferences, the Tigers rank dead last in spending in the SEC. That hasn’t stopped Missouri from going to two SEC championship games as the East representative, and they finish on average six spots higher than recruiting and spending expectations.

Who else overachieved relative to expectations to finish on average at least three spots higher than their recruiting successes and their ability to spend would indicate? Here is the full list of teams that met those criteria:

• ACC: Maryland (+5), Georgia Tech (+4), Wake Forest (+4)
• BIG TEN: Purdue (+3)
• BIG 12: Missouri (+7), Kansas State (+5), Oklahoma State (+3)
• PAC-12: Stanford (+4)
• SEC: Missouri (+6)

Teams with a more moderate success rate include past BCS and College Football Playoff finalists like Clemson, Oklahoma, Michigan State, and Oregon.

Underachievers in the standings among the Power Five conferences

The flip side of teams that overachieve against expectations, of course, is that other teams have to fail to live up to their anticipated results. In that regard, it is another team that shifted from the Big 12 to the SEC that offers the most sobering indication of performing below projections.

During their time in the Big 12, only Texas and Oklahoma outspent and outrecruited Texas A&M. The Aggies effectively recruited talent and spent money at a level relative to what TCU has done since the Horned Frogs replaced Texas A&M in the league. But whereas TCU averages a fourth-place finish in league play, the Aggies ranked 11th out of 14 Big 12 teams in terms of where they finished in the standings.

The shift to the SEC has actually benefitted Texas A&M in a major way. While their spending and recruiting is down relative to the rest of the league (sixth out of 14 teams instead of fourth), the Aggies have actually performed exactly as expected over their SEC lifetime.

The Big 12 is the source of many of the stories on both sides of the ledger. Colorado never spent heavily or recruited an exorbitant amount of talent to Boulder when they were in the Big 12, ranking 11th among 14 teams that played in the league. No team performed worse over that span. Since moving to the Pac-12, Colorado continues to perform worse on average than any of its new conference foes. The only difference is that they also spend and recruit at an even weaker pace relative to the other Pac-12 teams than they did back in the Big 12.

Underperformance is largely the provenance of powerhouses that have the reputation to draw talent and the booster base to spend freely but that cannot seem to get to the next level on the field. Here is where you find teams like Miami, Michigan, and Texas, all proud programs that have fallen on hard times over the past decade.

Who else underachieved relative to expectations to finish on average at least three spots lower than their recruiting successes and their ability to spend would indicate? Here is the full list of teams that met those criteria:

• ACC: Virginia (-5), Pittsburgh (-4), Miami (-3)
• BIG TEN: Michigan (-4), Maryland (-3)
• BIG 12: Texas A&M (-7), Texas (-5), Colorado (-3)
• PAC-12: California (-4), Washington (-3), UCLA (-3)
• SEC: none

The SEC is interesting in that regard, as Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Ole Miss all finished two spots lower in the aggregated standings than one would expect from their rate of spending and their luck on the recruiting trail. In this regard, coaching flux helps explain a large part of their failures to capitalize on the advantages at their disposal.

How might we see if a divide exists within a Power Five league?

Every conference inevitably has a hierarchy of teams. How concretized that hierarchy is — and how well it correlates to spending and recruiting rankings — helps determine whether there is a clear divide between haves and have-nots in a given conference.

The best way to see that in the chart above is by how much variance you see within a league. If there are a lot of outliers that overachieve and underperform relative to expectations, it is an indication that conference finish is not determined by how much a team can shell out and the types of players they can realistically expect to bring into their roster.

In that regard, the Big Ten has the lowest margin in variance and the lowest standard deviation. Michigan and Maryland have underachieved. Purdue has outperformed expectations. Otherwise the programs line up much as you would expect based on the composite of expenditures and recruiting averages. Five of the 14 programs perform to expectation, four more are one spot above or below those expectations, and Wisconsin and Michigan average two spots higher than their outlay projects.

The SEC is right there as well. Other than Missouri’s overachiever status, 13 of the 14 programs in the league finish within two spots above or below where one would expect from their spending and ability to draw talent. In comparison, the Pac-12 and especially the ACC have a much wider margin of variance and deviation within their conference races, as indicated by Virginia becoming the seventh different team to win the ACC Coastal in the past seven years.

Among Power Five conferences, though, no league has a wider variance than the Big 12. Missouri wildly outpaced expectations when they were in the league; Texas A&M wildly underwhelmed as a Big 12 program in its final years as a member. Kansas State and Texas are on massively variant trajectories as current members. At the same time, eight of the 14 teams that have played in the Big 12 ended up within one spot up or down from the expected finish.

On one hand, that variance indicates a conference that affords opportunity to a wider range of hopefuls and that is not dominated solely by those programs that can pull in the best players and the biggest checks from donors. On the other hand, the volatility of the Big 12’s shifting membership could also be an indication of the impacts of this volatility of expectation versus performance.

Have these disparities always existed within Power Five leagues?

Seeing these disparities from a 30,000-foot view is certainly valuable. But the first four years of the College Football Playoff were quite different than the heart of the BCS era or its waning years before obsolescence. As such, let’s also look at these five leagues in terms of their shift in relative variance over time to see if each one is becoming more or less predictable in regards to setting expectations from spending and recruiting.

The three charts below detail performance over three distinct four-year spans. In the green columns, each team’s final placement in that year’s conference race. Cells marked with neon green indicate a team reached either the national championship game (in the BCS era) or the College Football Playoff semifinals; cells in yellow mark years when a team played in a BCS bowl. The pink column denotes four-year average in spending relative to the rest of the conference; the blue column is the four-year recruiting rank.

The last two columns on the right match the columns in the first table above, with the VAR column marking the variance between average finish in the league table (four-year rank from green columns) and the composite of recruiting and expenditures.

2006 serves as an ideal place to start this study for several reasons. First, this was the first season when the BCS added a separate national championship game and expanded the openings available into a major bowl game. Before this season, further, recruiting data is less complete and consistent.

Much like we saw in the overall look over the full 12-year span, the Big Ten and SEC hewed closest to expectations over this period. The ACC was marked by Wake Forest’s rise and Miami’s fall after  the Hurricanes joined the league. What was at the time the Pac-10 saw USC dominate during the period. At the same time, Oregon State and Oregon performed well above expectations while Washington and UCLA failed to play to a level commensurate with their talent and spending advantages.

It is no surprise that Missouri was a pleasant surprise and Texas A&M a major disappointment for  their respective fan bases in the Big 12. Texas was still playing at a level more consistent with its stature and spending, but teams like Texas Tech were able to carve out contending seasons despite recruiting far less skill for their depth chart.

The last four years of the BCS era marked an era of flux in college football. The Big East devolved further as the ACC poached away Pittsburgh and Syracuse, while the Big Ten reached 12 teams with the addition of Nebraska and the Pac-10 became the Pac-12 by bringing in Colorado and non-AQ Utah.

Those realignments by the Cornhuskers and Buffaloes started a bigger shift in the Big 12. A year later, Texas A&M and Missouri bolted for the SEC. The Big 12 responded by poaching West Virginia from a dying Big East and non-AQ powerhouse TCU, setting their numbers at 10 teams.

In that span, four different teams won the Big 12 title. None were Texas, as the Longhorns cratered in the standings despite outspending and outrecruiting everyone in the  league. Three different teams won in the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten, though all were in the top five in the composite of league spending and recruiting.

The Pac-12 saw the biggest contraction in this period, as Oregon and Stanford dominated the expanded conference. Coupled with a fall by USC due to sanctions against the program, this shift in power occurred against expectations for both the Ducks and the Cardinal.

The first four years of the College Football Playoff era saw teams consolidate their advantages as fewer teams either outplayed or underperformed their expectations. As teams acclimated to their new surroundings and everyone adjusted to expanded conference races, things regressed back to the mean of expectation.

Mississippi State and to a lesser extent Missouri outpaced their expectations in the SEC, but it put little dent into the larger picture. Alabama and Georgia dominated the conference race year after year, with Auburn and Florida also playing to their level of talent and expenditures.

Oklahoma locked down the Big 12 race, with the top half of the league performing at or beyond expectations and the bottom half underachieving on the field. In similar fashion, Clemson dominated the ACC. The difference, though, is that Louisville joined the conference and immediately integrated in as an ACC Atlantic power. As a result, there are a proliferation of teams below the Cardinals that are performing below their projected finish.

Four different teams won the Pac-12 over the four-year span, with Washington performing closer to expectation under Chris Petersen and USC recovering from sanctions. Washington State also rose up under Mike Leach as he settled into life in Pullman, while Stanford continued achieving at a high level.

The Big Ten is where the most interesting divide can be seen. At the bottom of the aggregated standings at the start of the College Football Playoff era, the teams that finished ninth through 14th in the league matched their recruiting and spending composite perfectly. Ohio State won two conference titles, played in two of four editions of the College Football Playoff, and went to a New Year’s Six bowl the other two years. Wisconsin, Michigan State, and Iowa continue to outperform expectation, while Michigan, Penn State, and Nebraska underachieve.

What does this all mean in terms of a Power Five divide?

If your eyes are starting to get crossed at this point, let’s step back and reflect on what all this data says in the end.

To round everything out and bring it back out of a world of numbers and into what we see every weekend during  the football season, let’s look at each of these five leagues in turn…

ACC

The second big phase of the BCS era was marked by a wide-open ACC race. During the period from 2006 through 2009, Georgia Tech and Wake Forest joined Virginia Tech as conference champions. Traditional powerhouses like Florida State and Miami were unable to spend their way to the top of the league.

Over the last four years of the BCS, Virginia Tech was joined not by surprise finalists but bigger spenders and better recruiters like Florida State and Clemson. Even then, Georgia Tech and Duke both played for the conference championship in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

The past four years have seen things hew closer to those expectations. If not for the overachievement of new addition Louisville, teams like Florida State, Miami, Virginia Tech, and Pitt all finish right about where one would expect based on their performance on National Signing Day and in raising funds to spend.

Notable, though, is that the divide in this case seems to be split more neatly between divisions than we see in other Power Five leagues. Clemson dominates the Atlantic, while the Coastal remains one of the most level divisions in the country in terms of its parity.

BIG TEN

Between 2006 and 2009, one could look at spending and recruiting and reliably peg where a team would finish in the Big Ten. Other than Northwestern slightly overperforming and Illinois failing to meet expectations, every other program finished within a spot of their projected placement as Ohio State dominated the race on an annual basis.

Over the next four years, Wisconsin became the top dog in the conference as they raised their spending but continued to recruit at a middle-of-the-pack level. The variance distributed more diffusely through the final standings, indicating a closing divide.

The College Football Playoff changed all that. Unlike any other Power Five conference, the teams buried at the bottom of the standings struggle to play above their station. Some schools that have traditionally played above their projections continue to do so, but in general getting above that gap has been tough.

Some of that has changed in recent years, with Minnesota rising to Big Ten contention in 2019 under P.J. Fleck to join overachievers like the Badgers and Spartans. In general, however, how much a team spends and how well they recruit determines conference placement in this league far more closely than it does in other conferences.

BIG 12

Let’s just come right out and say it — the Big 12 is a mess to assess. Given its fluctuating membership, the variance found within its rankings across time makes it difficult to read too much into the data.

We know that Missouri outplayed their expectations and Texas A&M underachieved when they were members of the Big 12. In those first four years between 2006 and 2009, though, Texas remained a threat in the conference race. That change has been the biggest source of variance within the league.

After the Tigers and Aggies bolted for the SEC on the heels of departures by Nebraska and Colorado, TCU stepped up and has become both a big spender and reliably in the top half of the standings. That trend has continued over time, while the backslide by the Longhorns continues to throw off the rest of the conference.

What has changed in recent years is the hegemonic rise of Oklahoma. The Sooners have owned the Big 12 in recent seasons. Behind them, however, the Big 12 field is more open than anywhere else in the country.

PAC-12

After USC played Texas for the national championship at the end of the 2005 season, the Trojans remained the top dog in the Pac-10 for the next four years. That period was simultaneously marked by the rise of the two Oregon schools in the league, as the Ducks and Beavers pushed USC for the crown despite a marked disadvantage in recruiting and spending.

The last four years of the BCS opened the door for a shift in power. Oregon continued to spend at a commensurate level to the previous four years, but their recruiting rankings skyrocketed as success allowed the Ducks to draw better talent to Eugene. Stanford, though, joined them atop the Pac-12 despite ranking right in the middle of spending and recruiting within the conference.

In the College Football Playoff era, the Pac-12 has become even more open. As it shifted from the unipolar USC era through the bipolar rule of Oregon and Stanford, the Pac-12 has now arrived at a point where four different teams won the league crown from 2014 through 2017.

There is still an obvious divide, like the ACC marked in large part between the power disparity between the Pac-12 North and the Pac-12 South. While not quite as pronounced as the gulf between the Atlantic and the Coastal, the North has dominated the College Football Playoff era thanks not just to Oregon and Stanford but also the rise of Washington and Washington State into perennial contenders.

SEC

The last of the Power Five conferences was marked during the BCS era as the preeminent power conference thanks to a streak of national titles. At the start of the College Football Playoff, three different SEC programs ranked in the top four of the first-ever set of Top 25 rankings from the selection committee.

Ultimately, though, the SEC reveals the impact that spending and recruiting have on success both within a given season and long-term across more than a decade. In the period between 2006 and 2009, the top four teams in recruiting and spending were also the top four teams in the aggregate standings.

South Carolina broke that up with a strong run at the end of the BCS era, but otherwise spending dictated the level of talent a team could recruit and where that team finished in the table. At the start of the College Football Playoff period of the sport’s history, the top five teams in spending and recruiting remain the top five teams in terms of on-field performance.

That indicates a clear divide between the top of the league and the teams in the second and third tiers. While Mississippi State and Missouri might outperform expectations, that still means a midtable finish rather than sustained contention.

Final thoughts at the end of the regular season

In the end, as we prepare for conference championships to close out the 2019 season and ready ourselves for the release of the bowl schedule, the rich get richer while the poor remain buried in the cellar. Each Power Five conference demonstrates a clear delineation between haves and have-nots over the past few years.

While a team like Virginia or Baylor might rise up on occasion, the Power Five conference crowns have increasingly become the exclusive domain of a select group of contenders. In the Big Ten you know Ohio State will be in contention every year; the same can be said about Alabama in the SEC, Clemson in the ACC, and Oklahoma in the Big 12.

Only the Pac-12 has been a crapshoot in terms of who might emerge on top. Even then, however, there is a select pool of hopefuls from which one might realistically expect to produce the winner in a given season.

Ultimately, the divide between Power Five conferences appears to be overblown. The real story, when diving deeper into the numbers, is that divide within each league. In a given year, three dozen to four dozen Power Five programs can reliably be scratched off the list of hopefuls before the season even commences.