Quantifying Fun: The College Football Fun Index
Which teams had the most fun this season?
College Football can be a hard sport for some to follow. If you grew up in an area that wasn’t local to a college that plays major college football, or you went to a school that doesn’t partake in the sport, you may not feel a sense of loyalty or attachment to one particular team. Sports betting can give you a temporary allegiance to a team, but of course this requires risking your hard earned money, which can be a turn off to many individuals. If all of this applies to you and you’re looking for a team or teams to cheer for, the answer may just be the obvious: root for the most enjoyable product!
Attempting to quantify “fun” comes with a lot of caveats and subjectivity. Things that I think are fun in football may not be fun for others, but that is perfectly fine! The beauty here lies in the simplicity of our method to create what we will call the “Fun Index”. First, we will identify the variables in College Football that we think provide the most viewing entertainment. Next, we will put all of the numbers on the same scale, so large values and decimals can be treated equally. Finally, we mush them all together by taking the average of all of them combined, which creates a composite index of the variables. There you have it! A Fun Index.
Offensive Fun Index
We will split the offense and defense up so that we can see whether teams are more fun offensively or defensively, and then afterwards we can combine them together to get a final net team Fun Index. On the offensive side of the ball these are the variables used:
Offensive Success Rate: (A “successful” play is when the Expected Points Added are positive). I enjoy a good, consistent offense that can move the ball down the field with ease.
Explosive Play Rate: (An “explosive” play is when the EPA is greater than 0.8, or a 75th+ percentile play). Think big shots down the field, RB’s hitting highlight runs, and of course TD’s. Doesn’t get much better than that!
QB’s ESPN QBR: I am a big fan of QB Play, as evidenced by the many articles or graphs on twitter I post on the position. Elite QB play will get people tuning into games on Wednesday night featuring schools they didn’t know existed last week.
Plotting all 130 teams by just one metric is both hard or defaulting to a long winded table. So to add an extra level of analysis, we will pair our offensive fun index with each teams win percentage in the 2021 campaign. As you move right on this graph, you have a more fun offense. As you move up on the graph, the better win percentage the team achieved.
The team with the most fun offense is our beloved Coastal Carolina Chanticleers. Its hard to describe the Chanticleer offense in one sentence but here is my attempt: Picture a triple option team, then add in an elite QB that can add a passing dimension to the offense. QB Grayson McCall set a FBS record for Passing Efficiency, beating out a little known QB Mac Jones. He also finished 1st in my QB composite score, which combines metrics such as offensive PFF Grade, QBR, and CPOE. McCall will return for the 2022 season, which leaves Coastal in great shape to remain a very fun football team to watch.
On the flip side, you arrive at teams like Iowa, Clemson and San Diego State. The Aztecs at least had the luxury of masking their painful offense with the best punter in college football, Matt Ariza. Clemson’s offense could be compared to nails on a chalkboard, but they still squeaked out a 10 win season. Then we arrive at the Iowa Hawkeyes. Iowa decided to challenge themselves by playing offense that didn’t see like it wanted to score. They instead relied on their defense to come up with turnovers and defensive scores. It feels like a 10-4 record with that challenge feels like a success, but that hard capped ceiling will leave fans yearning for something better.
Defensive Fun Index
Now that we have the offensive side of the ball covered, we can move over to the defensive side. Personally I am not the biggest fan of defense slugfests, but there are aspects of this side of football that are exciting. They are as follows:
Havoc Rate: This is the rate of plays that include Tackles For Loss, INT’s, Sacks, Fumbles and Pass Break Ups. Basically the plays that have you beating your chest and flexing to your friends.
Defensive Efficiency (EPA/Play): It can be fun to watch your team stump the opposing offense over and over again. Especially when you can see the visible frustration set in.
Total Expected Points From Turnovers: Instead of just defensive scores, I chose EP from turnovers to capture all turnovers and their varying impacts. Defensive scores will carry a lot of EP, but so will long INT returns that didn’t quite make it to the end zone.
I paired our newly minted Defensive Fun Index with our Offensive Fun Index to get a team look at where the fun comes from for each program. Along with the three offensively challenged teams we examined earlier, you can see teams like Wisconsin and Houston rise to the top of the Defensive Fun Index. On the other side you have a team like Virginia, who was not a whole lot of fun to watch play defense, but their offense was very fun and resulted in many high scoring games throughout the season.
Team Index
Now that we have an offensive and defensive fun index, we can combine the two to create a total team fun index. As stated above, it is hard to get all 130 teams on one graphic, and our goal was to find the teams that put the best entertainment product on the field. So we will limited this to the top 25 teams this season.
The team with the crown of “most fun” in 2021 was our national champion Georgia Bulldogs. Following close behind was Cincinnati, the first Group of 5 team to make the College Football Playoff, and ACC Champion Pittsburgh. Many of these teams were competing for their conference championship, or had near program best type seasons. Ole Miss completed their first 10 win regular season in SCHOOL HISTORY, which completely shocked me given their long history of Football in the SEC. Michigan came up short in the playoff, but beating Ohio State for the first time in a decade was firmly in the “fun” column for the Wolverines.
Fun Football will always be entertaining, regardless of the teams. Seeking out the most entertaining football teams regardless of personal stakes in the game will always grow your love of the sport. Our “fun” indexes are a simple way to see which teams do the best at a set of variables we think provide the most entertainment value. As stated above, not everyone may enjoy the same things in a football game. If something else is fun for you, you’d just have to simply swap out the variables for different variables, and now you have your own personal fun index. With 130 FBS teams, there is bound to be a team or two that can maximize your viewing experience.
If you want to dive in to the data like I do, check out @CFB_Data and @cfbfastR on Twitter, where you can learn how to get started in the world of College Football data analysis!
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