The Recent History of BYU Basketball: Advanced Analytics
In recent years, many questions have surfaced regarding the state of BYU Men's Basketball. Is it time for Dave Rose to step down? Was switching to the WCC a good idea? How has joining the WCC impacted BYU Men's Basketball? Should BYU re-join the Mountain West Conference? Dave Rose has now retired and will be replaced by Mark Pope. It seems that BYU will be in the WCC for the foreseeable future. In this post, we take a look at what advanced analytics can tell us about how BYU has fared in recent years.
We used three different statistics to look at how BYU fared in a given year. We looked at the Jeff Sagarin ratings, the Ken Pomeroy (KenPom) ratings, and ESPN's Strength of Record. We gathered the statistics and plotted them for as many years as we could find (Sagarin: 1999-2019, KenPom: 2001-2019, ESPN's SOR: 2007-2019). In order to reduce confusion, we decided to work with where BYU ranked according to rating, instead of the actual ratings. The resulting plot is shown below, keep in mind that since this is rankings, the lower the number, the higher BYU was ranked.
The black circle on the graph represents Dave Rose's first season as head coach and the black square represents BYU's first season in the WCC. The statistics show that BYU was improving when Dave Rose became the head coach and they continued to improve at an impressive rate. The statistics also show that BYU immediately became worse when they entered the WCC. However, it must also be noted that BYU's first year in the WCC was their first year after Jimmermania.
While some years have been better than others, BYU has not performed as well since the few years after Dave Rose's first year. Some may argue that BYU's strength of schedule increased after they joined the WCC, but we checked on these statistics. We gathered strength of schedule statistics from TeamRankings.com and found BYU's strength of schedule has decreased since they joined the WCC. BYU's strength of schedule is shown below, with the black square again designating when BYU joined the WCC. One important thing to note is that the graph above starts with the 1999-2000 season, while the Strength of Schedule graph below starts with the 2009-2010 season.
In the last few years, BYU has gotten worse overall while playing an easier overall schedule. We do not mean this as a knock against Dave Rose. Dave Rose took BYU to heights that had not been reached in decades and as you may notice, while the team's performance digressed in later years, they never performed worse than the team Dave Rose inherited.
We believe that there are a lot of reasons to be excited about the future of BYU Men's Basketball with Mark Pope as the new head coach. In the coming days, we will release another a post analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of BYU's recent men's basketball teams. We will do so using Dean Oliver's Four Factors.
We used three different statistics to look at how BYU fared in a given year. We looked at the Jeff Sagarin ratings, the Ken Pomeroy (KenPom) ratings, and ESPN's Strength of Record. We gathered the statistics and plotted them for as many years as we could find (Sagarin: 1999-2019, KenPom: 2001-2019, ESPN's SOR: 2007-2019). In order to reduce confusion, we decided to work with where BYU ranked according to rating, instead of the actual ratings. The resulting plot is shown below, keep in mind that since this is rankings, the lower the number, the higher BYU was ranked.
The black circle on the graph represents Dave Rose's first season as head coach and the black square represents BYU's first season in the WCC. The statistics show that BYU was improving when Dave Rose became the head coach and they continued to improve at an impressive rate. The statistics also show that BYU immediately became worse when they entered the WCC. However, it must also be noted that BYU's first year in the WCC was their first year after Jimmermania.
While some years have been better than others, BYU has not performed as well since the few years after Dave Rose's first year. Some may argue that BYU's strength of schedule increased after they joined the WCC, but we checked on these statistics. We gathered strength of schedule statistics from TeamRankings.com and found BYU's strength of schedule has decreased since they joined the WCC. BYU's strength of schedule is shown below, with the black square again designating when BYU joined the WCC. One important thing to note is that the graph above starts with the 1999-2000 season, while the Strength of Schedule graph below starts with the 2009-2010 season.
In the last few years, BYU has gotten worse overall while playing an easier overall schedule. We do not mean this as a knock against Dave Rose. Dave Rose took BYU to heights that had not been reached in decades and as you may notice, while the team's performance digressed in later years, they never performed worse than the team Dave Rose inherited.
We believe that there are a lot of reasons to be excited about the future of BYU Men's Basketball with Mark Pope as the new head coach. In the coming days, we will release another a post analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of BYU's recent men's basketball teams. We will do so using Dean Oliver's Four Factors.
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