The 2016 Conference USA football preview countdown, from North Texas to WKU

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

I was right and wrong about Marshall last year.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

We like to think of program building as linear. You do pretty poorly in your first year, then you do a little better in your second, a little better in your third, etc., until one day you’re good.

At the end of each conference run-through, I take a look at how I perceive the conference’s balance of power heading into the season. This is in no way based on schedules, so they are not predictions. They’re just how I would rank the teams after writing thousands of words about each of them.

From the perspective of S&P+ averages, Conference USA was the worst in FBS last season. That was a surprise to see at first -- WKU was legitimately awesome, and three others were in the top 75 -- but it spoke to how bad the bottom half of the conference was.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

When you’re picturing how your program might be able to build from nothing into something, you’re basically picturing this chart:

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

I didn’t love the Skip Holtz hire. My general thinking was Sonny Dykes had found something that works well in Ruston --- air raid offense, swarming secondary -- and straying from that recipe by going with a guy more defensive by nature (with a stolid offensive history) seemed misguided. Tech had won 17 games in two years, and while the Bulldogs were guaranteed to step backwards in 2013 after losing a ton of important personnel, I didn’t love the idea of Holtz being the one to guide them back.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

In late-January 2010, coming off of a breakthrough 10-3 season that was the best in school history, Middle Tennessee head coach Rick Stockstill turned down an opportunity to jump up. Having already turned down the Memphis job, he said no to the East Carolina job that eventually went to Ruffin McNeill, choosing to remain in Murfreesboro.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

“The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps.”

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

Sometimes you can only learn so much about yourself. In 2014, Ron Turner’s second FIU team used a little bit of turnovers luck and quite a bit of defensive improvement to move from 124th to 96th in the F/+ rankings and from 1-11 to 4-8. It returned most of a bad offense and almost all of a strong defense, aside from a couple of safeties and the defensive coordinator.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

Say this much for Ed Orgeron: he has an eye for talent. The famed defensive line coach, now at LSU, has struggled to land another head coaching job because of how disastrous his three-year tenure at Ole Miss was (from 2005-07, the fiery Orgeron went just 11-25 in Oxford). But while the failure seemed to mostly stem from a lack of organization or strong planning, Orgeron had an eye for coaching talent.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

The first two words of last year’s Rice preview were “cruising altitude.” Hard jobs remain hard, but when you see what David Bailiff did at Rice from 2012-14, you can convince yourself that someone has figured out how to make a hard job easier.