I’d be the last one to say I understand all of these analytics that have come into the sports world in the last five seasons. I barely passed trigonometry when I was in high school.
So when ESPN says its Football Power Index, “measures a team’s true strength on a net point scale; expected point margin vs. opponent on a neutral field,” they might as well be speaking Romulan. All we need to know is who’s favored and why. Of course, the end result is important as well.
Before the season started, ESPN’s FPI basically laid out who was going to be good and who was going to stink it up. They mostly got it right, but there are a few cases where the team performed better than expected.
Here is how each Pac-12 team was projected to finish and how they actually fared at the end of the season.