While the bulk of Big Ten teams don’t start the 2022 season until two weeks from now, some will take the field in less than a week.
The top of the conference is up near the top of ESPN’s final 2022 preseason SP+ rankings, while many other teams aren’t expected to be very good. For instance, Indiana and Northwestern aren’t very highly thought of entering the 2022 season, while, naturally, Ohio State and Michigan are expected to be quite good.
According to author Bill Connelly, here is how he used advanced analytics to project where each team ranks:
These are based on three primary factors: 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? Who 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 subjectively; it’s also what these projections attempt to do objectively.
Without further ado, here is how each Big Ten ranks against the other, where it ranks overall, how it ranks offensively and defensively, and how many expected wins each will have overall and in-conference.