Just how unlucky are the Tigers?
Memphis football coach Mike Norvell repeated the question back to himself.
"Luck? Does luck play a role in football?" Norvell said, thinking for a moment. "I don't know."
According to analytics, it could help explain why Memphis is off to a 4-2 start.
Teamrankings.com, a website devoted to advanced sports analytics, has an equation for luck, and Memphis ranks 129th of 130 FBS teams in that category this season.
Put plainly, "luck" is how many extra wins a team has, compared to its estimated number of wins. It gives balance to Teamrankings' power ranking of every college football team because very lucky teams will tend to be ranked lower than their record would suggest.
Ken Pomeroy, the creator of the popular KenPom rating system for college basketball, uses a similar formula to calculate luck in hoops. Here's the way luck is calculated: 1 Determine how many games each team is expected to win. To find that, Teamrankings compares several offensive and defensive statistical categories between opponents, factors in the game's location and predicts a likelihood of each team being the winner.
2 Subtract the number of games a team is expected to win from the actual number of games won.
In Memphis' case, the Tigers' highpowered offense was expected to carry them past Tulane and Navy, but Memphis lost both games. The 22-21 loss to the Midshipmen and 40-24 loss to the Green Wave plummeted their luck rating. Not that Memphis reads much into any of that.
"Nah, (football is not determined) by luck," tight end Sean Dykes said. "You have to go out and beat people with your pads and with your brain. You have to be smarter, and physically do it."
To Dykes' point, there's no equation to pass off the dissection of Memphis' defense in Week 5 by Tulane as simply a little bit of bad luck.
But perhaps the downpour at Navy that slowed the Tigers' offense and potentially contributed to a costly fumble by tailback Patrick Taylor Jr. was a touch of misfortune.
"Maybe at times (you believe in luck)," junior linebacker Austin Hall said. "But each week you still have to prepare for somebody . ... Luck comes, I guess, but you can't just wait for it."
After all, it's not a coincidence that some of the NCAA's most disappointing teams rank at the bottom of the luck ratings, and the most surprising teams have found their way to the top.
Joining the Tigers in the bottom four of the luck ranks are winless San Jose State, Texas El Paso and Nebraska.
Central Florida ranked fourth in the FBS in the luck rating on the way to an undefeated campaign last season. Memphis finished with a positive rating as well, coming in at 47th.
So does the old adage that it's better to be lucky than good apply to Memphis?
"There are times that things happen where a ball bounces one way or another, and you can't control that," Norvell said. "But if you're prepared and you've done everything you can to put yourself in the right position, you'll always have a chance to be successful."