Final preseason SP+ rankings for all 133 teams and why the polls like USC and Texas more (2024)

Bill Connelly, ESPN Staff WriterAug 16, 2023, 11:46 AM
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The college football hierarchy for 2023 is taking on a pretty familiar look: known heavyweights at the top, followed by a chaotic mess. In this year's final preseason SP+ projections, the Georgia Bulldogs, Ohio State Buckeyes, Michigan Wolverines and Alabama Crimson Tide all start out within 1.1 points of each other ... and at least five points ahead of everyone else. Three of those teams are breaking in new quarterbacks and offensive coordinators, and that might be an opportunity for a shakeup, but these four teams have gone a combined 100-12 over the past two seasons (95-7 in games that aren't against each other) and claimed six of eight College Football Playoff bids. They have earned the benefit of the doubt.

Below are my final SP+ projections for the 2023 college football season. As covered in previous pieces, these are based on three primary factors: returning production (final rankings for which you can find at the bottom of this piece), recent recruiting and recent history. How good have you been recently? Whom do you have coming back? How good are the players replacing those you don't have coming back? That's loosely what we ask when we're setting expectations for a team; it's also what these projections attempt to do objectively, albeit with recent formula changes to account for college football's transfer explosion.

As always: SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking, and, along those same lines, these projections aren't intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the year. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date.

Here are the full rankings:

(Note: Strength of schedule ratings are derived by determining the win percentage an average top-five team would be expected to generate against a given team's schedule. Georgia's 12-game schedule would produce a win percentage of 0.869, or about 10.4 wins for a top-five team, while Alabama's would be 0.803, about 9.6 wins. That's a pretty significant difference.)

SP+ vs. conventional wisdom

For a majority of teams, SP+ and preseason prognosticators tend to agree. It's always interesting to see where they don't, though. And as is frequently the case, SP+ hates fun. It likes teams like the Texas Longhorns, Oklahoma Sooners and more than the pollsters, and it isn't sold on some of the sport's more entertaining teams -- namely, some of the Pac-12's more delightful squads and the best of the Group of 5.

The teams the pollsters like more

The Big 12's close-game winners. Last year's Big 12 champion and runner-up, the Kansas State Wildcats and TCU Horned Frogs, each averaged a 16.5 ranking in the preseason AP and coaches' polls, but SP+ thinks a little bit less of them, ranking them 20th and 21st, respectively. Meanwhile, the Texas Tech Red Raiders averaged a 25.0 poll ranking but are only 32nd in SP+.

These aren't huge differences, but it's definitely worth pointing out that while last season was a pleasant surprise for all three teams -- together, they jumped from a combined record of 20-18 in 2021 to 31-11 -- it was driven at least partially by good fortune in close games. They went a combined 13-3 in one-score finishes, 12-2 in such games that weren't against each other. That's hard to replicate, and SP+ is serving as a bit of a reminder of that.

The Pac-12. Some of it, anyway. The USC Trojans ranked sixth in both polls, while the Washington Huskies ranked 10th (AP) and 11th (coaches) and the Oregon State Beavers ranked 18th in both. In SP+, these three teams come in at 10th, 17th and 31st, respectively. Defense holds back the Trojans' and Huskies' projections -- USC is projected 47th in defensive SP+, UW 48th -- and while much of the top of the Pac-12 has strong returning production averages (see below), Oregon State ranks 65th overall, 107th on defense. Since defense drove last year's 10-win season for the Beavers, you see the effects here.

The Group of 5. This is an interesting time for non-power conferences. For one thing, the most consistently strong conference from these ranks, the AAC, just lost three of its five best programs (Cincinnati Bearcats, Houston Cougars, UCF Knights) and replaced them with six members of Conference USA that averaged an SP+ ranking of 93rd last year. CUSA then basically replaced those programs with independents and FCS programs. That's a downgrade in both instances.

Combine that with the fact that a lot of the better G5 teams lost quite a few stars to power-conference transfers and you get a pretty diluted set of overall G5 rankings. Not one team begins the season in the top 40, and only the Tulane Green Wave, SMU Mustangs and Boise State Broncos crack the top 50.

Preseason polls, meanwhile, are always pretty friendly to teams that, top-50 ranking or no, could finish the year with double-digit wins. Tulane, the Cotton Bowl champion, cracked the top 25 in both polls, and UTSA came close. The Troy Trojans weren't that far off, either. All three of those teams have strong projected win totals above, but they rank particularly high in SP+. Above all else, this is a reminder that SP+ is a power rating, and the polls look somewhat toward potential end-of-season finishes.

The teams SP+ likes more

Oklahoma and Texas. Since recruiting rankings are part of the preseason SP+ formula, it tends to always assume the best of teams like the Sooners (who also benefit from looking at extended recent history) and Longhorns. It also knows they weren't as mediocre last year as some might believe.

Just as TCU, KSU and Tech likely overachieved in close games last year, OU and Texas went a combined 2-10 in one-score finishes. They were close to having much, much better years than they actually did. They have to prove that their close-game struggles had less to do with execution and more to do with bad luck, but SP+ assumes the best and lists them as the top two teams in the conference. Texas starts out ninth overall (average poll ranking: 11.5), and OU is an aggressive 15th (average poll ranking: 19.5).

The SEC's light heavyweights. The Group of 5's best teams have iffy rankings but strong win projections; the second tier of SEC teams, meanwhile, has the opposite issue. Texas A&M, the Ole Miss Rebels, Florida Gators and Kentucky Wildcats rank 16th, 18th, 23rd and 24th in SP+, respectively, but they are all projected to finish with between 6.5 and 7.9 average wins. They probably won't all finish ranked in the polls because of this, and sure enough, only Ole Miss (22nd in both polls) and A&M (23rd AP, 24th coaches) cracked the preseason top 25s.

Preseason conference power rankings

SP+ is a team ranking, but it can tell us a lot about conference expectations, too. It can also drop some pretty big hints about the effects of both recent realignment and the transfer portal. Let's walk through some of the averages and projections for each conference heading into the fall.

1. SEC

Average rating: 15.7 (down 0.2, from 15.9 in 2022)

Average offensive rating: 34.7 (first)

Average defensive rating: 19.0 (second)

Average returning production percentage: 65.0% (first)

Top 4 teams: No. 1 Georgia, No. 4 Alabama, No. 5 LSU, No. 8 Tennessee

Recent changes

There are a few tweaks I need to mention here. First, I made tweaks to my historical SP+ ratings, as mentioned (and used) in this summer piece. But that's part of my normal "can't ever stop tinkering" mindset. There are two other things affecting how the ratings above look.

Special teams

I have finally begun the process of projecting special teams ratings. By the end of a given season, special teams SP+ ratings can make a decent-sized impact on your overall ratings, but I always zero everything back out at the start of a new year. Although I still haven't gotten as far as I want to when it comes to recording and incorporating returning production for special teams, I have come to note that, from a year-to-year basis, teams tend to hold on to a certain amount of their previous year's ratings.

Long story short: The projected special teams ratings above are based solely on distilled versions of last year's ratings. The South Carolina Gameco*cks finished 2022 ranked first in special teams SP+, with a +1.8 rating. They hold on to about 0.6 of those points to start the season, while the last-place San Jose State Spartans, who finished with a -1.8 rating, start 2023 at -0.6. (The two FBS newcomers, Jacksonville State and Sam Houston, start out at 0.0.) This obviously doesn't make a huge difference, but it does nudge otherwise excellent teams such as USC and the Florida State Seminoles, both of whom had very poor special teams in 2022, down a bit.

The effects of clock rule changes

This year, aside from the last two minutes of each half, the clock will no longer stop after first downs. The NCAA approved the rule change in an attempt to cut down on the overall length of games, and it will have an obvious effect on the number of plays and drives in a given game, too. How much of an effect, however, is less obvious.

In 2022, FBS games averaged 38.2 first downs outside of the last two minutes of each half. A certain percentage of these end up going out of bounds (and the clock will continue to stop after those), but if we estimate that these rule changes will result in an average of five extra seconds of clock running after each of these 38 first downs, that means we're slicing about 3.2 minutes, or 5.3%, of a given game. The ratings above take that 5% into account.

2023 returning production rankings

A large portion of these ratings is derived from changes associated with returning production. For the last time this offseason, let's revisit those ratings. My returning production formula is based around the percentages and positions that correlate the strongest with year-to-year improvement and regression -- intuitively, we know that change at the quarterback position matters more than other changes, and that's taken into account here.

Although it doesn't correlate to pure quality -- the Kansas Jayhawks and Missouri Tigers aren't national title threats just because they're ranked first and second below (oh, to dream of a return to 2007) -- teams at the top of the list tend to improve a solid amount and teams at the bottom usually regress.

The national average for returning production is 60.8% this season, the lowest of any percentages of the past decade. (I began collecting this data for the 2014 season.) Even though I incorporate incoming transfers' FBS production into the numbers for their new teams, this suggests that when teams lose players to transfer, they aren't necessarily replacing them with players with the same level of production.

That's particularly true for the Group of Five conferences, which are losing a solid amount of production to power conferences and replacing them with two types of players (former power-conference backups moving down and smaller-school stars) that haven't generated much FBS production to date.

The teams atop the returning production list don't have outlier-level percentages, but five of the lowest percentages of the past two decades have come in the past two seasons, and they're all from G5 schools. The Nevada Wolf Pack and Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors had dreadful returning production numbers last year and sank from a combined 14-12 to 5-20; this season, the Kent State Golden Flashes, UAB Blazers and East Carolina Pirates all have averages nearly as bad.

Here are the 10 lowest returning production percentages I have recorded to date:

2022 Nevada (22%) -- fell from 8-5 to 2-10 (-23.9 points in SP+)
2015 Kansas (25%) -- fell from 3-9 to 0-12 (-11.8 points)
2017 Air Force (27%) -- fell from 10-3 to 5-7 (-12.9 points)
2022 Hawai'i (27%) -- fell from 6-7 to 3-10 (-16.8 points)
2023 Kent State (29%)
2023 UAB (29%)
2020 Air Force (30%) -- fell from 11-2 to 3-3 (-3.8 points)
2023 ECU (32%)
2019 UAB (32%) -- fell from 11-3 to 9-5 (-3.8 points)
2016 Ohio State (32%) -- fell from 12-1 to 11-2 (-3.0 points)

Nevada and Hawai'i were also breaking in new coaches, as Kent State and UAB are this season. Maybe that makes their challenge greater than that of ECU, which has a well-established staff and culture? Either way, this shines a pretty clear light on why the Golden Flashes and Blazers, regular bowl teams (or close to it) in recent years, are projected to combine for only 8.2 average wins this fall.