The Luckiest Teams of 2011

After a year off, a review of the luckiest teams of the year is back. Two years ago I prepped the concept of “lucky.” It’s been a while so here’s a quick recap of how luck is defined for this exercise.

I define luck as what your record should have been with your full season performance and your schedule versus what your record actually was. It is not about injuries, having an easy schedule or even lucky bounces. Interceptions, punt returns and every relevant rush or pass are included in the full season team score. Fumbles, garbage time, interception returns and a few others play are excluded.

So the annual team score which is an average of up to 12 individual game scores (Championship and Bowl Games are excluded) and I take the schedule for the season and re-simulate it based on the actual quality of all the teams, not the pre-season expectation. I then compare actual records to projected records to find this years luckiest teams.

You could call this over or under-achieving and you would be partially right. The challenge is that over the last several years, I have been unable to find any teams that consistently bias one way by any real margin. You can point to grit, toughness, wanting it more and all the clichés, but with no record of teams being able to repeat, I just call it luck.

The Lucky

80 out of 120 FBS teams perform within 1 game of their projected total, leaving about 20 each in the real lucky and unlucky categories.

Ball St is the clear-cut winner for luckiest team of 2011, winning 6 when their performance and schedule predicted less than 3. Kansas St, unsurprisingly is the luckiest BCS team going a full 2.5 games better than they “should” have. Going 9-1 in games decided by a touchdown or less will make you feel pretty lucky.

Sugar Bowl opponent Virginia Tech checks in at #6. As has been discussed elsewhere, the Hokies had a strange season. Got blown out by Clemson twice, several decent wins and some strange close games. Ultimately a weak schedule, blowout losses and narrow wins over four unranked opponents lands VT at 2 games better than expected.

RG3 earned his Heisman carrying the pathetic Baylor defense. Baylor’s overall rating was lower due to their horrendous defense, but the offense was good enough to win games giving 48, 31, 26, 39, 38 and 42 points in the regular season. Of course they cap it off by winning while giving up 56 last night.

Penn St surely doesn’t consider themselves lucky right now but 9 wins was nearly two more than they should have had. The Nittany Lions were the anti-Baylor, doing with a stout defense and a really weak offense. Penn St went 6-2 in Big Ten play despite being outscored and also beat Temple by 4 in a game they had no business pulling out.

The Un-lucky

Some familiar names show up. UCF is tops at 3 games worse than expected. UCF had BCS buster talk heading into the season and failed to even qualify for a bowl. Even the 8 projected wins would have been a disappointment but going 0-6 in games decided by a TD or less really hurts.

Texas A&M’s trials this season are well-documented. They blew leads like crazy, lost five games to bowl teams in OT or by 4 points or less. The Aggies have to feel like in some alternate universe their season and Kansas St’s is switched.

The Big Ten+

Michigan checks in at slightly lucky. They were a toss-up between 9 and 10 wins and hit the over. The Wolverines had only 3 games decided by a possession or less and went 2-1 in them.