OBrien Leaves Penn State

At the beginning of this year, Bill O'Brien was hired as the new head football coach of the Houston Texans after being the head football coach at Penn State for two years. Given that O'Brien has now left Happy Valley, let's take a look back at the Nittany Lions under head football coach Bill O'Brien using the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model.  Below is a snapshot of the team for the last two seasons along with how the worst team would have performed as a guide.  

 

2012
In Bill O'Brien's first year as head football coach, Penn State finished with an 8-4 regular season.  The Nittany Lions played an "average" strength of schedule (SOS) as compared to the "league" average.  Penn State's best game this season was a victory over #33 ranked Wisconsin and their worst was a loss to #86 ranked Virginia.  Overall, the Nittany Lions had the #34 ranked team with the #65 ranked offense and the #14 ranked defense.

2013
In what ended up as O'Brien's last season as head football coach, the Nittany Lions finished the regular season at 7-5 and were still on post-season probation due to the Sandusky incident.  Penn State played an "average" strength of schedule (SOS) as compared to the "league" average.  PSU's best game was a victory over #9 ranked Wisconsin and their worst was a loss to #77 ranked Indiana.  Overall, the Nittany Lions had the #59 ranked team with the #64 ranked offense and the #43 ranked defense.  Given the decline in the team's defense from 2012 and that the offense was about average over the two years, we see that PSU declined to be just above average in 2013.  Whether that will continue or not is outside of the model's design.

Sometime in the future, but not soon, I will come back and look at Penn State under the last few seasons with Joe Paterno, but that is a blog for a different time.

Up next Nittany Lion fans is how Vanderbilt has performed under Franklin's tenure.

Analysis of 2013 NCAA FBS Head Coach Changes 
UMass and Charley Molnar
Boise State and Chris Petersen
Texas and Mack Brown
Washington and Steve Sarkisian
Wake Forest and Jim Grobe
Wyoming and Dave Christensen
Eastern Michigan and Ron English
Florida Atlantic and Carl Pelini
Miami of Ohio and Don Treadwell
UConn and Paul Pasqualoni
USC and Lane Kiffen