Comments on: BYU crushes Wyoming

By: Geoff J

Geoff J — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:36:39 +0000

I actually like the whole idea of the MTN Network now that I have access to it. If the rumors are true that ESPN is somehow involved in the back office dealings the best solution would be to work something out like the Big Ten Network has where ABC/ESPN has first dibs on games and the BTN airs the rest.

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:31:28 +0000

Well yeah, I’m pretty skeptical too. One big question would be how the MWC contract with The Mountain would work. (A disasterous idea if I ever saw one)

By: Geoff J

Geoff J — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:19:22 +0000

I’m skeptical of the rumors. I hope they are true though.

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:22:21 +0000

That would be cool. For several reasons. First it’d make in conference play even more interesting. It’d make the Pac-10 look even worse. And I think it would help with recruiting.

By: Chris H.

Chris H. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:05:01 +0000

I like the idea of adding Boise State, Fresno State, and Nevada to the MWC. It would also be a boost to the basketball season.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:04:21 +0000

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/288667-rumor-mill-mwc-to-expand-to-12-receive-auto-bid/poll_results#poll

Latest rumors about expanding the MWC and receiving an automatic BCS bid.

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:13:37 +0000

Karl, I’m more going by what players told me about how Lavelle treated them. That is he just didn’t take them as seriously as other games and the players reacting accordingly. Lavelle was very focused on conference games. I think today we just want more than that.

By: Geoff J

Geoff J — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:37:09 +0000

A writer over at espn.com recently said this about Whit:

Utah is an excellent team again and is so good in big games. Whittingham is a master at pushing the right buttons to rev up his troops

I think the compliment is accurate and while Bronco has a ton of strengths this probably isn't so much one of them.

By: Karl D.

Karl D. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:46:49 +0000

To add, one big problem with LaVelle was he didnâ€™t take bowl games too seriously.

I know this is conventional wisdom but the data are not entirely supportive of this hypothesis. This doesn’t mean you aren’t correct. Maybe Lavelle even suggested as much but once you control for opponent quality BYU’s performance in bowl games is pretty similar to its performance in regular season games during the LaVelle era.

This is not the most sophisticated thing in the world but here is what I did to get at this question. I formed two samples from 1976-2000 (I only have data back to 76). The first sample is BYU’s bowl games. The second sample is all regular season games where the season ending computer model ranking is less than 40 (I used the massey MOV computer model ranking, not perfect but a reasonable proxy for opponent quality). The bowl game opponents have an average year end rank of 21.8 (20 games) and the regular season sample has an average year end rank of 22.2 (60 games). One gets pretty similar winning percentage across the samples:

Bowl games: 0.375
Regular season of similar quality: 0.425

This doesn’t mean that it isn’t true that LaVelle didn’t take bowl games seriously. However, at worst the lack of seriousness didn’t have a dramatic effect on winning percentage once one controls roughly for opponent quality.

Some caveats:

(1) Clearly there is a bias related to using year end rankings, but I think it is the best I can do and it affects both samples.

(2) One potential problem with the analysis is the following: suppose BYU played tough bowl games in the glory years (1979-1991) and in the last 10 year of LaVelle’s career BYU played highly ranked foes in the regular season with increased frequency. If this is the case, then my comparison sample would be flawed. However, even if you just confine the data to the glory years the results don’t change much (both sample means increase).

(3) I could have a error or two in my data but I doubt there are enough data errors to matter much.

By: Clark

Clark — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:46:19 +0000

To add, one big problem with LaVelle was he didn’t take bowl games too seriously. I think Bronco does. But you’re right, he does have some trouble getting the team up.