2019’s projected 130-team college football rankings, from Alabama through UTEP
Here are the three pieces used to create these projections, along with some more notes at the bottom.
The preseason S&P+ projections are a simple mix of three factors: recent history, returning production, and recruiting. To come up with 130-team projections for all of FBS, I create projected ratings based on each factor. Here’s how the process works:
• For recruiting, I create a rating based on these weighted four-year recruiting rankings. The weighting (67 percent this year’s class, 15 percent last year’s, 15 percent the year before that, three percent the year before that) is based on what makes the ratings most predictive.
• For returning production, I take each team’s returning offensive and defensive production(which are on different scales) and apply projected changes to last year’s ratings. The ranking you see below is not where they rank in returning production but where they would rank after the projected changes are applied to last year’s S&P+ averages. This piece makes up a vast majority of the overall S&P+ projections.
• For recent history, I’ve found that getting a little weird predicts pretty well. This number isn’t a strict five-year average — last year’s ratings already carry heavy weight from the returning production piece. Instead, what you see below is a projection based solely off of seasons two to five years ago. Recent history doesn’t carry much weight in the projections, but it serves as a reflection of overall program health. We overreact to one year’s performance sometimes.
Nebraska Football: 2019 S&P+ Preseason Release and a Season Projection
Can Nebraska go from 4-8 to 8-4? I used the S&P+ numbers for an early guess.
With recruiting “done and dusted”, we’ve officially entered the desert of college football. And with the men’s basketball failing to, once again, capture and hold the imagination of the collective fan base, we’re all desperate for content. Thankfully, here at SB Nation, we have Bill Connelly. For those who don’t know, in addition to writing previews for all 130 FBS teams (Bowling Green and Kent State yesterday!), Bill Connelly is the mind behind the S&P+ rating system for comparing college football teams. The system uses advance analytics and a huge dataset (thousands of games) to estimate the quality of FBS football teams. I’ll let Bill tell you about the numbers, but essentially, S&P+ compares all of the teams to a mythical “average” team. The S&P+ values therefore indicate that for any given team X, their score means they are so many points above or below that average team.
