BYU Football Upperclassmen and Winning Percentage

Following our college football attendance analysis, we’ve received a few requests to analyze different types of sports-related data. One of those requests was to review whether having a larger percentage of upperclassmen on BYU’s football team would have any predictive effect upon the team’s winning percentage. This sounded interesting so we got some data from the folks at byuroster.com and set to work analyzing it.

The main goal was pretty simple: See whether upperclassmen have a noticeable impact upon winning percentage. Since BYU had a JV team up until 1991, we only included data between 1992 and 2011. Our conclusion, judging from the analysis presented below, is that the percentage of upperclassmen, by itself, has no noticeable effect upon BYU football’s winning percentage in any given year.

See for yourself (click the image for a larger version):