And what do you suppose the chances of giving up 70 points to Wisconsin or 63 points to Ohio St. if we played them 10 times?The idea is that a team can't control those residual values. They are purely random which with enough data will converge to 0. It's like if you flip a coin ten times and it lands tails 8 times. Would you expect 8 tails on the next 10 turns?
There's definitely a fair amount of issues with analyzing these projected records, most notably high player turnover from year to year due to this being college ball. But I have a feeling we'd be feeling a lot differently about this upcoming season if we won ~8 games each of the last two years instead of 9 or 10.