The Florida Gators football team starts the spring at No. 33 overall on the SP+ rankings from ESPN.
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. 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 season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date,” according to ESPN staff writer Bill Connelly.
Florida’s 8.6 SP+ rating is mostly thanks to the offense. The Gators’ offensive SP+ rating of 34.4 is the 27th-highest rating in the country, but a defensive rating 25.8 (49th) brings the overall number down a bit. Perhaps surprisingly, Florida’s much-criticized special teams unit is ranked ninth in the country with 0.6 ratings.
At the top of the preseason list are the usual suspects, Georgia (34.5) and Ohio State (30.1). Texas (28.7) checks in at No. 4 before starting its SEC journey, the reigning national champion Michigan Wolverines are fifth (27.0), and a Saban-less Alabama (26.6) is at No. 6.
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