Conference USA Turnover Luck Trends

If you haven't read the primer from Bill C. yet, you should probably do that first. Let's jump right into the numbers this time.

Holy crap. This thing looks like a damn Christmas tree! In a thirteen team conference, more than half of the teams were either extremely lucky or extremely unlucky in each of those first three columns. "Conference USA, where nobody is average."

So let's start with Florida International. They were insanely lucky in all three categories - fumble recovery, offensive interception rate, ad defensive interception rate. This explains why they were second nationally in overall turnover luck, and was likely a big chunk of the reason they improved by three wins over last season. Then again, they had the second best turnover luck and still only won four games. Thank God Richard Leonard is coming back.

Louisiana Tech had similar results and a similar turnaround, as did Southern Miss, though I might be a bit concerned that such a drastic change in turnover luck only yielded a 3-9 season. Todd Monken has a long way to go, but these numbers at least indicate progress.

Middle Tennessee on the other hand, holy crap. Thanks in large part to having insanely poor luck on offensive interceptions, they saw as big a drop in turnover luck from the year before as FIU did improvement. Also, it appears that UAB was similarly unlucky, which definitely bodes well for them next season as they... oh wait. Nevermind.

It's also pretty impressive that Marshall put together the season that they did considering what poor turnover luck they had. Their luck should likely improve, but I can't imagine it will improve enough to cancel out losing one of the greatest QB/WR duos in the program's history. I'll go ahead and say they won't be undefeated next season.