At bottom, the underlying point of Pythagorean Wins in regard to predicting future performance is that teams that overachieve -- i.e. win more games than their Pythagorean projections says they should have -- tend to decline the following year, and teams that underachieve -- i.e. win fewer games than their Pythagorean projections said they should have -- tend to improve the following year. After analyzing SEC football from 1999-2006, it becomes very obvious that Pythagorean Wins is a highly useful indicator of future performance.
Among the major declines that Pythagorean wins predicted included 2000 Alabama, 2004 Ole Miss, 2004 Florida, and 2005 Tennessee. Among the major improvements predicted by Pythagorean wins included 2001 Alabama, 2005 Alabama, 2005 Florida, 2006 Arkansas, and 2006 Tennessee.
Generally speaking, the magic number seems to be one. You come up with a Pythagorean projection based on the eight regular season conference games, and the teams that win a game or more above their Pythagorean projection tend to decline the following year, and teams that win a game or fewer above their Pythagorean projection tend to improve the following year.
Here are the Pythagorean projections for the 2006 season:
Obviously, we had three overachievers -- Florida, Kentucky, and Auburn -- and two underachievers -- South Carolina and Vanderbilt -- in 2006.
The Gators, despite having a projection of only 5.5 conference wins, went 7-1 in conference play, won the SEC, and ultimately became national champions. Auburn was the second most overachieving team, and it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The Tigers beat LSU on a controversial call, stood up South Carolina on the goal line, beat Florida in a narrow game, needed an interception returned for a touchdown to beat Ole Miss, and had another narrow win over Alabama, despite being annihilated by Georgia and Arkansas. Kentucky, too, becomes suspect with a few close wins mixed in with a few lopsided blowouts.
The underachievers, as largely expected, include South Carolina and Vanderbilt. Both teams played solid football all year, but generally ran out of luck in close contests.
You never know for certain, and there will be some exceptions, but if you are looking for teams to mildly improve in 2006, Vanderbilt and South Carolina would be safe beats, and no one should be surprised if Florida, Auburn, and Kentucky suffer a bit of a decline.
A few more general notes on Pythagorean wins:
- Generally speaking, the underlying rule regarding Pythagorean wins holds true in SEC football. There does seem to be a couple of exceptions, however. The first exception is second year coaches. Even when a team overachieves with a first year coach, they often times nevertheless improve in their second season. It's not a guaranteed thing, but apparently the gains made by continuity and that particular coach's players in place help offset what the Pythagorean projection says you should do. The second exception is with the sisters of the poor of the SEC, mainly Kentucky, Vanderbilt, and Mississippi State. For whatever reason, those teams tend to be able to underachieve one year, and consistently do as bad or worse the following year. I'm not sure why that happens, but it is something that keeps popping up.
- If you factor out the last-second fluke touchdown that Auburn scored on Florida (in which had no influence on the outcome of the game), the Pythagorean projections flip a bit, as suddenly Auburn was the most overachieving team and Florida was the second most overachieving team. Some people take out meaningless, fluke points like that because they skew the data, and that wouldn't be a bad idea in this case. But, technically if I did it for that game, I'd have to do it for every other, too, so I decided against that for the sake of simplicity.
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