Using Pythagorean Theorem to find breakthrough teams in 2024

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Betting Stuff: Using Pythagorean Expectation to find breakthrough teams in 2024
Derek Peterson | 

Gus is going to sleep hard during these next few months ahead of fall camp. From December through May, it could be argued that only a handful of coaches worked more tirelessly on the recruiting trail than the fourth-year UCF coach. The 25 transfer players UCF has added since the end of the 2023 season are tied for the seventh-most of any FBS team. (Each of the six schools with more either have a first-year head coach or a coach entering Year 2.)

"Roster management is so important. (You have to be) a little bit of a GM. The role of a head coach has really changed. What I love to do is coaching players on the field. Once your spring practice, fall camp starts, that's the funnest part for me. The reality is putting together a competitive roster each year and keeping the integrity of your program with your core beliefs. That's the challenge for all coaches in this day and time."

--Gus

UCF needed to add depth to its roster one year after making the jump from the American Athletic Conference to the Big 12. Malzahn and Co. tried to keep the core of the team together while fortifying the two-deep —

"We're really trying to build quality depth, but obviously there's nothing like going through it and seeing what reality is," Gus said of Year 1 in the Big 12. "It was good for us to get that foundation of that first year and seeing what we need to do as a program to be able to compete for a championship in that league. It's a good conference. Every week you're playing a good team. There's no off week. That was our mindset after the season as far as addressing our needs."

Gus's portal haul didn't steal headlines for its quality. The group ranked 22nd among transfer classes by 247Sports. But it's not a group that should be overlooked.

The same can be said of the Knights in general entering the 2024 season.

UCF won 6 games last season. It lost 5 straight to begin Big 12 play before winning 3 of its final 4 — including a 45-3 beatdown of then-No. 15 Oklahoma State.

Three of the Knights' six regular-season losses came by less than 3 points. They lost to Baylor 36-35 on Sept. 30 after being outscored 26-0 in the fourth quarter. They lost at Oklahoma 31-29 after taking a 23-17 lead into the fourth. And they lost to Texas Tech 24-23 on Nov. 18. Kansas was the only team all year to beat UCF by more than 13 points.

"This place is a goldmine. It really is," Gus said. "Our best days are ahead of us. I don't think it's going to be very long at all."

Originally designed by Pythagoras of Samos (refined by Bill James) as a way to calculate a baseball team's projected winning percentage based on runs scored and runs allowed, Pythagorean Expectation uses a team's point differential to determine relative strength.

The underlying assertion is that plain win-loss records can be deceiving. It's why we don't put Liberty into the Playoff for winning 13 games. A 30-point win is treated the same as a 1-point win and a victory over FCS Southwest is treated the same as a victory over Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Pythagorean Expectation is just another tool, and it has been shown to have predictive utility in college football.

There are outliers, as with anything. But in general, teams that outperform their Pythagorean Expectation one year tend to regress during the following season, while teams that underperform tend to improve.

Last year, UCF's 2-game difference between expected and actual wins was the fourth-worst at the FBS level. At most books, UCF's total in 2024 is set at 7.5. FanDuel currently has the best value on the over (-105).

Here are some of the teams that most underperformed expectations:

A&M — Pythagorean Expectation: 9.4 | Actual wins: 7

UCF — Pythagorean Expectation: 8.0 | Actual wins: 6

Arkansas — Pythagorean Expectation: 4.7 | Actual wins: 4