What do you do with BYU?
On figuring out the year's most prolific overperformer
After spending the early part of the week mostly writing about a very depressing, underwhelming program - go read that here if you’d like - it is nice to write about an overachiever as a short Saturday post. (Also it’s 9 AM as I type and I gotta go for a run.)
You may or may not have read much about BYU this year, part of the nü-Big 12 scene alongside fellow compatriots Houston, Cincinnati, and UCF. Unsurprisingly, Houston looks like the best of them, but if you go look at KenPom at this very moment, you’ll see an expected top three. But I guarantee you will not be expecting who #4 is.
The BYU Cougars entered this season 13th in the Big 12 preseason media poll; they are now 4th in the country by the most trusted metric in the sport. Even my own Big 12 preview, which I felt was perhaps a little too rosy, only had them 8th in the conference and a borderline NCAA Tournament team. No preseason top 100 team’s stock has risen as much from November 6 to today as BYU’s has. This is despite a resume that…well, doesn’t really pop off the page.
The best win there is a home win over a very good San Diego State team, but aside from that, it’s a loss in the only true road game they’ve played so far and a just-fine performance against a middling NC State team. That concludes the list of games again top 100 competition for these guys, which is not an offensive thing by any means but sort of limits the amount of meaningful data we have for the #4 team in the country.
As such, BYU is being treated as a fraudulent team first and a mystery team second. It doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts these guys, and just searching “BYU” from people I follow turned up a ton of skepticism from people who don’t believe this is real. Healthy skepticism is good, of course, and it keeps you honest. However, for the last two weeks, I’ve pondered a question: what about the overachievers before them? How’d they turn out?
Since 2016-17, there have been 13 preseason top 100 KenPom teams who’ve risen in his ratings by 7 points or higher:
This is a laundry list of interesting outcomes, which we’ll get to, but this is mostly just to base your expectations from. Of these, BYU’s improvement of +9.92 from opening day ranks third-best behind last year’s national champion and a mega-outlier from Arizona State in 2017-18 when they started 12-0. They’re also in a somewhat unique position, though. Over the last seven seasons, UConn and 2016-17 West Virginia are the only preseason top 40 teams I’ve found to overachieve their preseason rating by 9+ points before the New Year.
It’s nice to have that list, but it’s meaningless without the context of how they went on to perform the rest of the way. Luckily, there’s a graphic for that, and it tells a story I find pretty interesting.
On the whole, these teams ended up losing a little steam before the end of the season, and three - 2021-22 LSU, 2019-20 OSU, 2017-18 Arizona State - somewhat collapsed by season’s end under varying circumstances. That being said, I look at this and my takeaway is…it really isn’t that bad?
Consider BYU’s circumstances right now, which is that they’re the #4 team in KenPom thanks to a huge out-of-conference performance. If that -0.61 point penalty was applied to them, it’s a rating of +25.9, which would have been good enough for a top-8 KenPom finish in four of the last five seasons. Even applying the most extreme penalty available here, 2019-20 Ohio State’s dropoff of -5.65, still gives you a team with a +20.86 rating. They’d be #21 this year and, on average, #16 across the previous 5 seasons. Not bad at all for a team that was 13th in their conference’s preseason poll.
Still, there’s a glaring thing we’re missing here, which is that BYU has benefitted an incredible amount from shooting luck on both ends. At a +12.7% on 3PT% this season, only Baylor and Miami have benefitted from a larger shooting disparity on the perimeter. That’s fine for now, but it might not be fine for long. When I looked into this after Ken’s post about Miami, I came away with data that shows the biggest November/December 3PT% underperformers often see severe regression to the mean the rest of the way. These are how the top 5 3PT% differential teams performed in January-April:
That spells serious trouble for teams like Baylor, Miami, and BYU. Even so, we do have 12 games and 800+ possessions of data now. Using Hoop-Explorer’s 3PT% luck adjustment piece, it has BYU as roughly 4.2 points worse than its performance thus far, with pretty much all of that coming from the 24.9% allowed from deep.
If that’s the case, it still doesn’t really hurt BYU all that much because they’ve built up such a huge advantage during non-con. A -4.2 penalty to their rating would place BYU at a +22.31 rating, which would be good enough for an average finish of #13 over the last five seasons. That’s still really good!
There’s also the possibility that BYU’s perimeter defense is simply very good. ShotQuality’s metrics have the Cougs 24th in the nation in Open 3 Rate Allowed on defense, 14th in expected catch-and-shoot 3PT% allowed, and 8th in pull-up 3PT% allowed. That’s come against a lighter schedule, obviously, but even against quality competition it’s held up pretty well.
Even if you apply that full 12% penalty from the graphic above here (which itself implies that BYU does nothing whatsoever to make up for it, an unlikely event), the Cougars would still play at the level of a borderline top 25 team the rest of the way. Given that they’ve played like a top-5 team thus far, that still averages out to be a team with a top 15-20 NET or better.
So: what do you do with BYU? I’m of the opinion that these guys probably aren’t the fourth-best team in America. I am also of the opinion that they’re still very good, a serious overachiever, and even the most negative historical view I can conjure of them still puts them as a likely 4 or 5 seed in March with shooters littered across the roster. The one thing I don’t want to do with BYU: deal with their transition game. You kidding me?