With preseason polls, awards, and all-conference teams releasing ahead of kickoff in a few weeks, one interesting set of rankings to look at is ESPN’s SP+.
The rankings are updated throughout the offseason and regular season, based on a formula and things that factor programs as described below:
Returning production (final rankings for which you can find at the bottom of this piece), recent recruiting and recent history. How good have you been recently? Whom do you have coming back? How good are the players replacing those you don’t have coming back? That’s loosely what we ask when we’re setting expectations for a team; it’s also what these projections attempt to do objectively, albeit with recent formula changes to account for college football’s transfer explosion.
The overall ranking also factors in defensive and offensive SP+ with a projection of how many wins.
For North Carolina, they checked in at No. 25 on the preseason rankings with a score of 12.9. The Tar Heels had an offensive ranking of 37.0 which was 16th-best in the country. Meanwhile, the defensive ranking of 24.1 was 57th in the country.
The model projects the Tar Heels to win 8 games, including 5 in ACC play.
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