Power 5 Team Performance After Conference Change

Brett McMurphy has a nice article on the twelve "Power 5" NCAA FBS teams that have changed athletic conference since 2011.  McMurphy uses winning percent and conference titles as his measure of team performance, which is very reasonable.  I looked at those teams using the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model for the FBS from the data provided from www.cfbstats.com.

Let's take a look at each season starting with the 2011 season.  In 2011, Nebraska left the Big 12 to play in the Big 10; Colorado left the Big 12 for the Pac 10; and Utah left the Mountain West for the Pac 10.  Here is Nebraska, Colorado and Utah's total production.  As you can see, Utah has been recently the best of the three; and has the best average production rank since 2011.

Looking at the 2012 season, Missouri and Texas A&M moved from the Big 12 Conference to the SEC; and TCU moved from the Mountain West and West Virginia moved from the Big East to the Big 12 Conference.  All four teams have been on average above average in their total production rank, with TCU as the most productive of the group; and Missouri and Texas A&M being almost identical in their average production rank.

For the 2013 seasons both Pitt and Syracuse left the Big East and moved to the ACC.   Pitt is basically an average program over this time period, and Syracuse was substantially below average (even with their highly productive 2018 season).

For the 2014 season, Louisville moved from the American Athletic Conference to the Atlantic Coast Conference; Rutgers left the American Athletic Conference to the Big 10 Conference and Maryland left the Atlantic Coast Conference for the Big 10 Conference.  We see that Louisville (even with the 2018 season) was the best of these three teams in terms of overall production; while Rutgers was one of the worst teams overall.

Finally, here is all 12 teams on one graph.

Finally, what I am interested in is how does it effect the athletic department financially moving from one conference to another conference?  Sounds like something I should add to my list of research projects.