It was a familiar ending for NU fans this past Saturday, as the Houston bowl did not go in our favor.  From this fan’s perspective, the loss didn’t hurt nearly as much as some previous games (UCLA ’05 and Missouri ’08 are still the most painful for me)… I can’t tell whether this game was fundamentally less painful or if the ongoing streak has just numbed me (pun intended).  I know that the worst I felt on Saturday was during the 3rd quarter, when it was 30-7… maybe somehow the disappointment of the final score was mitigated by the fact that the Cats finally played well on offense in the 4th quarter.

The Scuzz model was downright unconvinced the Cats had a chance in this game.  The model liked A&M to win by 15 and assigned 32 confidence points to this game in the ESPN bowl challenge.  I’m not trying to assign blame, but if you breakdown NU and A&M’s performence by efficiency, the Wildcat offense did not live up to expectations, while the D performed better than anticipated.  I’ve tried to highlight this in the graphic below:

Each individual unit’s efficiency rating (purple and burgandy) is geared to show performance against an average team… since A&M’s offense is above average, and NU’s defense is below average, a much higher efficiency output was expected by the model (light green bars).  NU’s defense held A&M’s offense under the model’s expectation and below A&M’s average season output;  the NU offense did not rise to the expected level of output, though did outpace what A&M’s defense allows on average (dark green bars).

Now, one might argue that A&M was just clock killing in the 4th, and that lowered the result, but after NU got within 1 score, A&M had one drive that resulted in points – that wouldn’t have much of a negative effect on A&M’s overall efficiency output.

I highlight this as a lot of the post-game commentary I’ve heard focused on the D, rather than the offense’s inability to attack for 3 quarters.  As I’ve said on the podcast most of the year, I believe this team wins with offense, not defense.

Speaking of painful bowl losses… I had to feel for Stanford the other night.  I felt like I was watching the ’08 Alamo and ’09 Outback bowls all over again, where the Cats’ played for a FG rather than going for the TD.  Brutal.  Something for all us fans to remember the next time NU’s kicker missed a “chip shot” at a critical moment… this happens in college football all the time (and in the NFL too… coaches are way too reliant on kicking the FG in those situations).

Picks Update:

The Scuzz Model is leading the pack in the West Lot Pirates ESPN bowl pool, and has reached the top 15 in the Lake the Posts pool.  The model tripped up on both Wisconsin and Stanford, but had either of those gone the other way, another 99th percentile finish could’ve been in order.  Instead, the model will probably finish in the low-to-mid 90s (currently 94.7% in the confidence pool, and 95.0% straight-up).

The picks I posted last week only went 2-4, but the model is winning at a 62% clip against the spread:

Scuzz Model Bowls – Straight Up:   23-7
Scuzz Model Bowls – ATS:  15-9

Here’s picks for all the remaining games:

West Virginia +3 over Clemson
Pittsburgh -3.5 over SMU
Arkansas State -1.5 over NIU
Kansas State +8.5 over Arkansas
Alabama +1 over LSU

Since last week’s post regarding the impact of coaching changes on bowl performance we’ve had several additional examples of these bowl situations play out… 

Arizona State, Southern Mississippi, & UNC all have coaching “issues”.  Most interesting is UNC with their lame-duck /interim coach Everett Withers.  He held the “interim coach” position this entire season and is now leaving to be DC at Ohio State, yet stayed on to coach the bowl.  This is the situation most closely resembling Texas A&M, in my opinion.  If you were watching earlier this evening, you saw UNC get smoked by Missouri.

I’ve updated the chart from last week, adding in these new results and clarifying the buckets a little bit… now you can see the Lame Duck and Promoted categories on their own (rather than mixed with the fired coaches).

As a couple of our readers pointed out, the Football Outsiders also tackled this question last week using a longer time horizon.  It’s a great read and worth checking out.  The biggest differences are my willingness to include situations like Rich Rod (who wasn’t actually fired yet) and Bill Stewart at WVU (who wasn’t fired, but the next HC had already been hired).  They also use their FO expected scoring to measure performance, whereas I’m comparing to the Vegas line, which presumably already factors in some impact of the coaching upheaval (example – the line for the Pitt-SMU game this year has dropped 2 points in SMU’s favor, due to the coaching issues at Pitt).

My numbers still show a big difference in how teams perform with a lame duck coach (the FO crew showed positive scoring margin in this bucket, but suggested it was skewed by the Ralph Freidgen game at Maryland… I categorized that as a “send off” game, given that everybody but the Maryland AD thought Freidgen didn’t deserve to be fired).   The UNC game from tonight and ASU game from earlier in the week bolstered both the number of games and the negative trend in the lame duck category, as both those teams were hammered by their opponents.

Additionally, I took a look at teams playing bowl games close to home.  This was a pretty loose analysis – I didn’t calculate actual milage distances – but considered anything played about a 1-2 hour drive of a team’s home field; this is similar to the distance A&M will travel for Saturday’s game.  Across the 9 games I found since 2009, the “home team” out-performed the spread by about 1.8 points.

So given the spread for the NU game is A&M by 10… if we boldly adjust for both the coaching situation (I’ll use the fired+lame duck value of negative 10.6) and the home field advantage, that leaves A&M as about a 1.2 point favorite… lets call it Texas A&M -1.5.

Barring the adjustment discussed above, the Scuzz Model doesn’t like NU’s chances in the bowl game, giving only a 25% chance for a Wildcat win.  But the model was wrong about most of A&M’s losses this year, including against Missouri where the Aggies were 80% favorites.  As we tried to highlight in this week’s forthcoming podcast, the Cats really have their work cut-out for them in this game, but A&M has some definite weak spots that we will hopefully see NU exploit.  I am confident (as always) the Cats can win this one, but the margin for error is very slim.

Some bold bowl predictions… I won’t lie, I’m going out on a limb with a number of these (MSU and Wisc for sure), but here  are some bowl picks from the Scuzz Model:

Western Michigan +3 over Purdue
Louisville +1.5 over NC State
Toledo -3 over Air Force
Tulsa +1 over BYU
Michigan State +3.5 over Georgia
Wisconsin +4.5 over Oregon
West Virginia +3 over Clemson
Arkansas State -1.5 over NIU

Scuzz Model Bowls Straight up 6-2
Scuzz Model Bowls ATS 6-1 
(games where Scuzz Model and Vegas show identical lines are excluded)

Given the complicated status of the Texas A&M coaching staff, I decided to go back and look at how teams with coaching issues performed in last year’s bowls.   The results won’t thrill NU fans, but a couple of interesting trends can be observed, and there is hope for a decrease in performance.

There are several categories of interim coach, depending on the situation at a given school:

Sendoff  –  these coaches have either retired, resigned, or in some cases been fired, but are generally coaching their teams’ bowl game as a last hurrah after a relatively successful or long tenure.  The two examples from the 2010 bowl season were Ralph Freidgen at Maryland, and Urban Meyer at Florida.  Both teams obliterated their opponents.

Lame Duck – these coaches are presumed to be losing their jobs, often regardless of bowl outcome.  Last year’s examples were Rich Rod at Michigan and Bill Stewart at WVU.  (note, Stewart was not fired immediately, but going into the bowl Dana Holgerson had already been hired as OC and “head coach in-waiting”).  Both Michigan and West Virginia laid eggs for their lame duck coaches.

Interim Coach – Promoted:   This category includes schools where the head coach left for another job — NIU (Jerry Kill) and Miami (OH) (Haywood).  It seems that these teams are often galvanized by the departure of their head coach (WVU post Rich Rod a few years ago comes to mind as well), and play extra hard for the interim coach.  NIU and Miami both dominated their opponents last year despite close to even odds placed on their games by Vegas.

Interim coach – Fired:  now we get (partially) to the situation Texas A&M is in.  In this case the coach has been canned, and an interim coach appointed.  These situations show mixed results for the two cases from last year:

Miami Hurricanes — Randy Shannon was fired after another disappointing season, and the team looked completely disinterested in their bowl game against Notre Dame.  Miami was favored by 3, and lost by 16.

Pittsburgh Panthers — Dave Wannstedt was forced out of Pittsburgh, and the players responded with a resounding 17 point win against Kentucky (Pitt were 3.5 point favorites).  Players afterward said they felt responsible for Wannstedt’s dismissal, and were playing for him (in a “sendoff” type fashion).

To evaluate the impact of these results, I’ve summarized how teams with “coaching issues” performed in bowl games relative to expectations, as defined by the Vegas line:

So all teams with issues over the last 2 years performed 2.5 points better than expected.  Interim coaches, whether coaching due to a firing or promotion, out-performed the spread by almost a touchdown.  However, when we limit the view to situations where the coach was fired performance is flat over the two years, and dropped by about a FG in 2010 alone.  Only when the fired coaches and lame duck coaches are lumped together to we see the real drop in performance, by one to two touchdowns.  Interestingly, teams who fired their coaches before the bowl game were 3-1 over the two year time-period, so decreased production did not necessarily equate to losses.

The main reason for combining the ‘Fired’ and ‘Lame Duck’ categories is that Texas A&M technically falls into both buckets.  Mike Sherman was fired as head coach, and interim coach (and DC) Tim DeRuyter is kindof a lame duck, in that he’s leaving to coach Fresno State, but staying on for the bowl game (to me that is more “lame duck” than “promoted”).  NU fans can hope that these data from the past two seasons are indicative of future performance, and that Texas A&M plays two scores worse than expected.

It should be noted that these results are based on a very small sample size.  Only 14 bowl teams in the last two years were impacted by a coaching change.  This year there are a whopping 13 teams impacted, so we’ll continue to track this throughout bowl season.

Scuzz Model Bowl Record:
2-1 straight up
3-0 against the spread

Regular Season Record: 
75% straight up (72.5% excluding games vs FCS)
56.9% against the spread (in perferred point range – 7 to 19 points
different from published line)

Get the most recent from the Scuzz Model with a detailed look at NU and MN offensive efficiency ratings, likelihoods for big ten division winners, plus this week’s picks.