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Bill Connelly: UVA’s Bronco Mendenhall accounts for about half a win per year more than Mike London

Second-order wins suggest Mendenhall adds value where London was weakest

Bill Connelly is to college football stats about what Ken Pomeroy is to college basketball stats. If you aren’t a regular reader of Connelly’s Football Study Hall blog on SB Nation, fix that. We’ve used some of Bill’s projections here on STL before and they’re a valuable tool for projecting game winners throughout the year.

Today, Bill published a list of the coaches who—since 2005—have strayed the farthest from their number of projected wins. His list uses a concept he developed called “second-order wins,” which Bill describes thusly:

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.