ESPN’s Bill Connelly puts together his SP+ rankings every single season. Fans have gotten several different versions over the course of this offseason, and on Sunday he unveiled his final preseason SP+ rankings.
For those wondering what SP+ is, here’s a quick description from Connelly.
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. – Connelly, ESPN.
The Iowa Hawkeyes ranked No. 27 nationally in the final preseason SP+ rankings, which was good for sixth among Big Ten teams. In order to put his SP+ projections together, ESPN’s Connelly uses three primary factors: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history.
Hawkeyes Wire already touched on where Iowa and the rest of the Hawkeyes’ opponents rank in the final preseason SP+ rankings. In terms of where each college football conference ranked, the Big Ten checked in as the nation’s No. 2 conference on average in the SP+ rankings.
Now, let’s take a look at one of the individual components that helped Connelly put these rankings together. Here’s where Iowa and each of the Big Ten teams ranked in terms of returning production.