When college football teams fall hard or make big jumps, it can happen for any number of reasons. The simplest is luck, or random variance in events that takes a team that should be this good and causes it to produce a record that good.

My colleague Bill Connelly has tracked a series of stats that seek to measure how likely a team was to win a given game, even if it didn’t actually win it. That data produces second-order win totals and percentages:

The idea behind win expectancy is simple: It takes the key stats from a given game (success rates, explosiveness, field position factors, and other factors that end up going into the S&P+ ratings), mashes them together, and says, "With these stats, you probably could have expected to win this game X percent of the time." Add those figures up over the course of a season, and you get a glimpse of what a given team probably could have expected its record to be.

There’s nothing more important than wins and losses. But for the sake of projecting how teams might do in the future, more detailed indicators exist.

Teams tend to drift toward their second-order win totals over time. The teams that have outplayed their records the most (or vice versa) have tended to drift back to their means in the years following. For example, the four teams with the biggest positive difference between actual wins and second-order wins in 2015 were Houston, Northwestern, Michigan State, and Iowa. That group won a combined 47 games in 2015, then a combined 27 this past season.

So, let’s start with the teams whose 2016 win totals likely should’ve been higher.

The 9 teams that most underpeformed their expected records in 2016 Team Rec 2nd-Order W Difference Win Pct Diff Team Rec 2nd-Order W Difference Win Pct Diff Notre Dame 4-8 7.2 3.2 26.5% Michigan State 3-9 5 2 16.9% Virginia 2-10 4 2 16.5% UCLA 4-8 5.9 1.9 15.7% Texas 5-7 6.8 1.8 15.3% Utah State 3-9 4.8 1.8 15.1% Indiana 6-7 7.7 1.7 12.9% Ball State 4-8 5.6 1.6 13.2% Toledo 9-4 10.5 1.5 11.8%

Notre Dame went 4-8. That will never stop being funny. But any stories about how Brian Kelly has to bring his 4-8 program back from the abyss strike me as a little dramatic. Notre Dame could’ve won eight games without doing much differently. Their losses included games in which they mostly outplayed Duke and Navy, and tossups against Virginia Tech and Stanford. They lost in overtime on the road to Texas, and they lost in a literal and figurative washout against NC State. The Irish are probably going to be fine in ‘17.

Michigan State fell from the ranks of the Big Ten East heavyweights and was replaced by Penn State. The Spartans were bad, but they weren’t terrible. They were roughly equal in quality to bowl-eligible divisional competitors Indiana and Maryland, at least. They could’ve beaten both Northwestern and Ohio State and made a bowl. Seven or eight wins next year is a reasonable target, though MSU loses a lot of production.

If Texas won the extra two games it could’ve, would the Longhorns have fired Charlie Strong and hired Tom Herman? It felt like merely making a bowl would’ve spared Strong. The Longhorns let winnable West Virginia and Kansas games get away, and they had a funky loss to Cal.

And for the other side of the coin:

The 9 teams that most overperformed their expected records in 2016 Team Record 2nd-Order W Difference Win Pct Diff Team Record 2nd-Order W Difference Win Pct Diff Idaho 9-4 6.7 -2.3 -18.0% West Virginia 10-3 7.9 -2.1 -16.5% Ohio State 11-2 9 -2 -15.6% Stanford 10-3 8.2 -1.8 -14.2% Kansas State 9-4 7.2 -1.8 -13.5% Navy 9-5 7.2 -1.8 -13.2% Georgia Tech 9-4 7.4 -1.6 -12.6% Air Force 10-3 8.4 -1.6 -12.1% Arizona State 5-7 3.6 -1.4 -11.8%

West Virginia probably wasn’t as good as a standard 10-win team, based on the Mountaineers’ quality and the schedule they played. Neither the ‘Eers’ offense or defense cracked the top 25 nationally, either by points per game or S&P+. They won two games they could’ve lost, against BYU and Baylor, and preserved the Baylor win in a particularly wild way.

Ohio State won two late-season games it would’ve lost most of the time. Their win expectancy against both Michigan State and Michigan was 17 percent, but the Buckeyes won both games by a total of four points. It would not have been difficult for the Buckeyes to post a 9-3 season and never get the chance to be shut out in the Fiesta Bowl against Clemson.

Arizona State was really bad. The Sun Devils’ year will be remembered for a season-ending, six-game losing streak that kept them on the precipice of bowl eligibility for eternity. But to even get to that, they had to sneak past a bad UCLA in a game where the Bruins had 79 percent win expectancy. They got outplayed narrowly in a win against a bad Cal, and they didn’t suffer a slipup in tight games with Texas Tech and UTSA. This was more like a 3-9 team.

Wondering how your team did? Here’s the whole country.

A negative difference means the team won more games than its second-order win total suggests it should’ve: