Deeper Dive: Best BYU Football Coach & Team
My rankings using quality scores from historical data since 1922
Introduction
In honor of the ending of the 2024 BYU Football Season this past Saturday winning their bowl game (season 11-2), I wanted to do a post looking at historical data and answering two questions…
What years had the best BYU football teams?
Who was the best coach in BYU football history?
I did a previous post with analytics on the last 100 BYU vs. Utah matchups and hint Utah won 66% of them! Read more below if interested…
Charts
First, let me talk about what I did. I needed to create a “quality“ metric to judge the best coaches and years of BYU Football, so I brainstormed different ideas that would be both easily accessible (don’t want to do too much scraping) and gives an overall picture of the quality.
To create the quality metric, I combined 3 stats equally into one final “quality score”:
Average games won by season (wins / total number of games) good teams win games!
Point differential (average of points BYU scored - points opposing team scored). The idea was I want to reward teams losing by smaller margins and winning by larger ones.
Strength of schedule (average of all opponents average games won in a given season). For a season with particularly strong opponents, the quality metric should be more forgiving and vice versa!
You may disagree with how I made the quality metric; if so, please let me know. It’s hard to boil down a team’s quality into a single number - especially with limited data back to the 1920s! Very open to others thoughts and opinions on how to do this.
Using this quality score, I created all my charts today.
What Years Had The Best BYU Football Teams?
You may be surprised to see the national championship year not as #1! If you look at the strength of schedule score, although winning the national championship, on average the teams that BYU played in 1984 had worse records than teams BYU played other years dropping the national championship team to #7 overall best team.
Keep in mind, though, the early 1980s were clearly a dominant era in BYU Football with 4 of the 10 best teams being in this period.
For those curious, the 2024 team was rank #18 of all BYU Teams with a quality score of 0.73. Average game score: 85%. Strength of Schedule: 40%. Point Differential: 62%.
Let’s now look at quality over time to get a sense of the progression of BYU Football.
From this chart, it seems like before the 1970s BYU football was objectively worse. It rose in the 70s and has remained higher since with the occasional dip. Bit of a lull in the 90s, but the last 20 or so years have been strong years for BYU football.
For those interested, I also made a chart visualizing the 3 components of the quality score over time.
Point Differential and Average Games Won show a similar trend. Interestingly, the hardest schedules for BYU were early on in some of the first years of the program.
Who Was The Best Coach In BYU Football History
Here is the same chart as above, but I overlayed a timeline of the head coaches across the years. Early on, BYU changed their head coach every few years until LaVell Edwards who stayed for 30+ years as head coach. More recently, coaches have switched less often, but no one has stayed as long as LaVell Edwards.
Looking at an average quality score by coach, Bronco Mendenhall has the highest score. Though, notably, Lavell Edwards and Kalani Sitake are quite close.
Looking at the breakdown, LaVell Edwards did not lead because he had a lower strength of schedule on average compared to Sitake and Mendenhall. LaVell Edwards scored the highest on winning games and point differential.
I was surprised to see Sitake so high, but I guess BYU has come a long way from the early days of the football program. Also, recently, Sitake has seen some strong seasons including this last one!
Conclusion
So, takeaways,
The BYU Football program has seen a lot of growth over time - especially in the 80s during LaVell Edwards stead.
The past 20 years BYU Football has output some of its best teams and best coaches. Mendenhall and Sitake are strong coaches with strong quality scores.
BYU saw a lot of turnover with coaches in the beginning, but has recently kept coaches longer, so we may see Sitake for several years to come.
Let me know your thoughts. Did I miss something? What would you like to see more of? How would you craft a quality score?