Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight looked at which college football teams do the most on the field with the least amount of talent, and BYU, Utah and Utah State were ranked in the top 30.
Before giving his team-by-team rankings of 128 Division I schools, Paine explained how he came up with the numbers.
“To get a sense of which teams have gotten the most — and the least — out of their talent, I took ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) ratings for each FBS program over the past two seasons, and plotted them against 247Sports.com’s Team Talent Composite scores,” Paine wrote.
In more simple terms, he looks at a team’s success compared with how well it did in recruiting.
Using the formula explained earlier, he had BYU ranked at No. 17, followed by Utah at No. 23 and Utah State at No. 29.
Air Force came in at No. 1 in the ranking, with Western Kentucky at No. 2 and Navy at No. 3.
Is BYU a 10-win team?
Athlon Sports polled five writers who did game-by-game predictions of how the BYU Cougars would do during the 2017 football season.
JMoneySports 