Woah, We're Halfway There

Is ASU living on a prayer? Or are they the real deal? We take a look at what analytics tells us about how the second half of the season will go.

Apologies for the cheesy title. I’m trying to get a little more interesting with them. My wife says they are usually too boring.

I don’t have a lot of time this week, so we’re going to skip some of the normal weekly features and get right to a mid-season review. My Big 12 Power Rankings for this week can be found on my X.com post here.

Mid-Season Analytics Review

Now that we’ve hit the mid-point of the season, we have a decent idea of what the ASU Sun Devils are as a team. The analytics do as well. One thing to keep in mind is that these analytics ranking systems do not actually take into account won/loss record. They reflect how the team has actually played - playing well but losing to a really good team would cause a team to rise in the analytics rankings, but playing poorly against a bad team would result in a decline in the rankings, despite winning. These rankings are meant to be predictive and forward-looking, and not reflective of where teams should be ranked in the polls or CFP Rankings. They give us an idea of what to expect over the rest of the season, based on ASU’s performance in the first half of the season.

We’re going to look at three difference rankings: KFord Ratings, SP+, and FEI. The KFord Ratings are done by Kelley Ford, and can be found here. Most of you are familiar with Bill Connelly’s SP+ ratings, and they can be found here. FEI ratings are a product of Brian Fremeau, and are located here. These rating systems all have slightly different formulas, so we’re going to look at them all, average them, and get a pretty good picture of what to expect out of ASU over the final six games.

The analytics see ASU as about the 45th-best team in FBS, with an offense and defense both ranked about 40th, and special teams that rank near the bottom. It also sees them as smack dab in the middle of the Big 12. Does this surprise you? Did you think “wait a minute, I thought ASU was a borderline top-25 team, they’re 15-20 spots too low!”? Again, these rankings don’t take into account actual wins and losses. It considers factors that are widely seen as key to winning football games and ranks teams based on those.

So why isn’t ASU ranked closer to 25th by the analytics? One reason is that ASU has played in 5 one-possession games and has won 4 of them. In other words, ASU has played in several pretty evenly matched games, the results of which swung on the outcome of a handful of plays. The analytics aren’t going to see ASU a whole lot differently than another team who has played opponents of similar quality, played them pretty evenly, but where only a small number of plays went differently, and as a result lost 2 or 3 games instead of only 1. The takeaway here can actually be quite positive - ASU is well-coached, resilient, and good in important moments and has won the types of games that other similar teams lost.

What does this mean for the rest of the season?

Both SP+ and KFord project ASU to finish with about 7.5 wins, meaning that they think they’ll win 2 or 3 of their remaining games. SP + has ASU as favorites in only one of their remaining six games (UCF), but in 4 of the 5 games in which they’re underdogs, they’re only slightly so - about a field goal or less. KFord also has ASU as slight underdogs in 4 of the remaining games, and favorites in 1. Additionally, only 2 of the remaining games are at home. What this means is that the margin between going 1-5 and 5-1 over the final 6 games is pretty thin. Quite similar to how the first 6 games went, actually. Below are the SP+ projected margins and KFord projected win percentages for each remaining game:

As for me, I think ASU most likely finishes with 8 wins, with the likeliest path being wins over Oklahoma State, UCF, and UofA.

What are your predictions for the second half of the season? Let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading and please subscribe so that you can get the newsletter delivered to your inbox each time a new edition comes out.