Huskers vs Expected Wins

Mavric

Mavric

Yoda
Staff member
As @CFBNumbers showed, the 2021 season was historically disappointing. The 2021 Huskers finished 4.6 wins below expectation using post game win probability. The only other team to finish more than 3 wins below expectation during the College Football Playoff era is the 2021 Navy Midshipmen. However, 2021 wasn’t the only Huskers team, or even Scott Frost Huskers team, to finish with the most wins under expectations. The 2018 team was also worst in the nation at 2.8 wins below expectation during Scott Frost’s first season in Lincoln.

Over the entirety of the College Football Playoff era, no team has won fewer games than expected than the Cornhuskers. Since 2014, the Huskers have a total of 9.4 wins below expectation (the number 9.4 is a cruel irony in itself). Louisville and Iowa State are the only other programs giving up more than 7 wins over the last eight seasons.
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No surprise here. Judging by the immense disappoint I've felt after every season, almost every game, the past few years I certainly can't dispute these numbers. Ugh :(

 
High yardage team that cant score, commits too many self inflicted penalties and constantly has 2-3 WTH games a year against s#!t teams... yup sounds about right

 
Just shows in a dramatic graph what us die hard ‘unrealistic’ fans have been seeing.  The team is capable of so much better than it has been.  Not champions of anything but 3-4 more wins a year and three bowl games would help.  There’s still be a lot of upside to go from there but Nebraska has no business being a cellar dweller in FBS, year after year.  

 
Hey, a bit of good news. At least we aren’t Kansas yet. You can’t fall 3 or 4 wins below expectations when the expectation is only 0 to 2 wins.

 
84HuskerLaw said:
Just shows in a dramatic graph what us die hard ‘unrealistic’ fans have been seeing.  The team is capable of so much better than it has been.  Not champions of anything but 3-4 more wins a year and three bowl games would help.  There’s still be a lot of upside to go from there but Nebraska has no business being a cellar dweller in FBS, year after year.  
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I hate to burst your victim bubble but what it actually shows is that we've been much better than our record indicates.

 
Whose expectations are these? Official CFB prognosticators? Las Vegas? 

The other way to look at this is that expectations for Nebraska have remained high, even a generation after the Glory Years. 

Unreasonably high? I mean, me and Las Vegas just assumed Scott Frost could do four games better than Mike Riley with the same raw materials. For that matter, everyone figured Mike Riley finally had the pieces in place to build on his 9 win season in 2016. Bo Pelini had too many wins to show much win improvement, but every year his team was ranked higher in pre-season than it finished.

Hard to accept, but the media has had a pro-Nebraska bias for years. 

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
Whose expectations are these? Official CFB prognosticators? Las Vegas?
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No.

https://cfbnumbers.substack.com/p/a-numbers-nightmare-the-tragedy-of

https://collegefootballdata.com

To look back at the tragedy of the Cornhuskers, we will primarily be using a metric known as “post game win probability” (PGWP). This metric comes from CollegeFootballData.com, and is defined as follows:

“Post game win probability looks at advanced metrics like success rates, PPA, and scoring opportunities and assesses the probability of each team winning should the game be played again with equivalent stats. In other words, if you take all of the plays in a game and shuffle them into a random order, how often would each team be expected to win?”

Things like penalties and turnovers are not included in the metric due to the noise associated with each variable. PGWP is just one way to observe a game and get an understanding of which team played well enough to win, regardless of the scoreboard.


 
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