It’s that time of the year again… ESPN has released their college football preseason SP+ rankings ($).
Year after year, ESPN’s Bill Connelly releases his ESPN SP+ rankings early before the season, and we see these rankings updated accordingly. While no metric is perfect for analyzing a football team, Connelly’s SP+ has proven to be a solid model that considers multiple key factors regarding a football team, including returning production, recent recruiting, and recent history. Here is a bit of what Connelly had to say about ESPN’s SP+ for you to better understand its purpose.
It’s 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.
Clemson is lower on the preseason ESPN SP+ rankings this season than in previous years. Ranking No.16 definitely isn’t bad, and it doesn’t mean the Tigers won’t be strong in 2024; it’s just where this specific metric has Clemson’s place right now.
On offense and defense, we see some consistency here, with Clemson’s 36.6 on offense ranking No.15 and their 18.6 for defense ranking No.20. These aren’t bad places for Clemson to be, especially considering some of the turnover this roster has on defense. The main concern comes from the Tigers’ special teams.
The Tigers struggled with special teams in 2023, with their 0.1 and No.66 ranking reflecting that. While the Tigers’ offense needs to show drastic improvement, it’s safe to say special teams do as well.