Kansas football (3-2) (1-1) is in a weird place right now. From an outside perspective, 3-2 with two games split in conference is a good mark. After all, in the grand scheme of things, while the Jayhawks have been able to shake off a number of the past narratives that had built up, it is still Kansas, still a team that will put basketball first, and that's the end of the matter. Yet those with a keen interest in the program will look at the devastating fashion in the 42-31 loss to the Missouri Tigers and the 37-34 loss to the Cincinnati Bearcats and see a repeated theme of not enough juice to close things out.
After the latest loss to the Bearcats this past Saturday, you could feel the frustration growing. Kansas had taken a 34-30 lead with 1:45 to play and just needed one more stop to move to what would have been a smooth 4-1. Instead, a clinical drive by Brendan Sorsby and missed opportunities cost the Jayhawks when it mattered most.
Yet if there is one thing for better or worse, analytics does, it is the fact that numbers take the emotion out of the game.
One ESPN metric in FPI specializes in running a number of different scenarios every day to give its most accurate statistical outlook on a team.
Here is an acute description of how FPI works: “The Football Power Index (FPI) is a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team's performance going forward for the rest of the season. FPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. Projected results are based on 20,000 simulations of the rest of the season using FPI, results to date, and the remaining schedule. Ratings and projections update daily.”
For the Jayhawks, the FPI does not tell them to throw their toys out of the pram and start pushing the alarms quite yet, as Kansas’s FPI ranks 31st in the nation.
In ESPN’s 6+ wins metric, which is one of many metrics that fall with the daily FPI reset, and uses the 20,000 simulations. The Jayhawks are still given an 88.2% chance of hitting six wins and a projected W/L of 5.1-7.0.
The question becomes, is that good enough?