Go fourth and prosper: Why Texas Tech’s aggressiveness should be the norm in college football

In a roundabout way, Texas Tech gamed my SP+ ratings in 2022.

I have long written about a measure I call postgame win expectancy — it takes all the plays in a given game, tosses them into the air and, based on the stats that tend to be most predictive (and which feed into SP+), says, “With all these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time.”

Add up all your postgame win expectancies from a given year, and you get what amounts to a second-order win total: “With all these stats this year, you could have expected to win X games on average.”

In Joey McGuire’s first season in charge, Texas Tech’s second-order win total was 5.8 — not bad against a top-15 schedule that featured five SP+ top-20 opponents, and good enough for 32nd overall in SP+. Their actual win total? Eight. In terms of the difference between wins and second-order wins, it was the third-largest overachievement in the country. Only Sun Belt champion Troy and BYU topped it.

The Red Raiders beat Oklahoma 51-48 despite a 39% postgame win expectancy. They comfortably won games against Kansas (43-28) and Ole Miss (42-25) despite pretty tight stats (postgame win expectancy: 65% and 69%, respectively). And against Texas in September, they pulled off an absolute magic act, beating the Longhorns 37-34 in overtime despite getting outgained by 2.3 yards per play (7.1 to 4.8) and generating a far worse overall success rate (48% to 37%). Postgame win expectancy against Texas: 2%. On average, these four games should have produced about 1.8 wins; Tech won all four.

Was this lucky? Perhaps. Tech did recover all three fumbles in the win over Texas — two of their own (on drives that produced 10 points) and one from Texas in overtime (which ended the game) — and fell on an unsustainable number of loose balls throughout the season. But they also rigged these games in their favor with an extreme willingness to go for it on fourth down.

The Red Raiders were 6-for-8 on fourth downs against Texas, and for the season they went for it a whopping 52 times, easily the most in the country.

Of these 52 attempts, Tech converted 33 and went on to score 129 points after these conversions. After the 19 failures, they allowed 44 points. That’s a profit of plus-85 points, or nearly a touchdown per game over 13 contests. Yes, there was a bit of good fortune in overachieving their win expectancies. But it wasn’t all luck. McGuire played the odds, used fourth down as a win opportunity and won games with it.

Your coach could do the same.