The off-season is over! SP+ is here! With the class of 2023 recruiting – both traditional signings and transfers – on the books for now, and with a reasonable understanding of who’s coming back and who’s not, we can take our first step towards the 2023 college football season with an initial SP+ projection. .
When we last saw college football, Georgia was finishing the season as a lightweight world number one. What has changed since then?
I base SP+ forecasts on three main factors, weighted by their predictability:
1. Return of products. Returned production figures are based on lists that I have updated as much as possible to account for transfers and attrition. The combination of last year’s SP+ ratings and adjustments based on production returns makes up about half of the forecast formula.
2. Recent set. This article informs us of the scope of potential team replacements (and/or new stars) in the roster. It is determined by ranking over the last few years in descending order (meaning the most recent class has the most weight). Starting this season, I also include transfers – both quality and volume – in a different way. After last year’s transfer-related personnel change, I have a little more data on how to deal with it. This part is about one third of the projection formula.
3. Recent history. Using a piece of information from previous seasons (two to four years ago) gives us a good idea of the overall state of the program. It goes without saying that a team that has played well for one year is less likely to repeat that effort than a team that has been good for many years (and vice versa), right? It’s a minor piece of the puzzle – only about 15% – but the predictions are better with it than without it.
I will update these numbers in May and August after further transfers and roster changes (and after I have a little more time to tinker with transfers and other factors). In the meantime, let’s see what SP+ has to say about the college football landscape.
SP+ Reminder: This is a measure of American Football performance adjusted for pace and opponent. This is a predictive measure of the most enduring and predictable aspects of football, not a summary ranking, and along the same lines, these projections are not meant to suggest what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of 2018. year. This is simply a power rating at the beginning of the off-season based on the information we have been able to gather to date.
Here’s the full rankings, now featuring 133 teams plus Jacksonville State and Sam Houston. Team #1 shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Source: www.espn.com
