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By Bill Connelly, ESPN staff writer
Let's get started! My annual college football series usually starts in February, but due to the spring portal window (i.e. I didn't want to write a preview that would get out of date in a few days), I decided to wait a bit. However, now is the time. Starting in the next few days, I will be previewing one conference per week.
But first, we need to update the numbers: As is customary, we released our first projections for 2024 SP+ back in early February, but now that nearly every team has announced their official 2024 roster (Air Force and Coastal Carolina are still waiting) and the spring portal dance has mostly settled down, it's time to do it again.
Below are our updated SP+ predictions for next season: As a quick recap, our preseason predictions are based on three factors.
1. Resumption of productionReturning player production numbers are based on rosters that have been updated as much as possible to account for transfers and turnovers. A combination of last year's SP+ ratings and an adjustment based on returning player production makes up more than half of the projection formula.
2. Recent hiresThis portion informs us about the caliber of a team's potential replacements (and/or new stars). It is determined by descending recruiting rankings over the past few years (i.e. the most recent classes are weighted the most). It is also influenced by the recruiting rankings of incoming transfer players, acknowledging that the art of roster management is now heavily driven by the transfer portal. This portion makes up roughly one-third of the prediction formula.
3. Recent HistoryUsing just a smattering of information from the past four or so seasons, we can get a decent measure of the overall health of a program, and it stands to reason that a team that did well one year will be less likely to repeat that effort than a team that did well for multiple years (and vice versa).
(Another note: SP+ is a college football efficiency metric that adjusts for tempo and opponent. It's a metric that predicts the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a resume ranking. As such, these projections are not intended to infer what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we've been able to gather thus far.)
