Tag: ESPN SP+ Rankings

One of the most interesting metrics we like to follow that correlates to a college football team’s strength and talent is ESPN’s SP+ rankings (subscription required) by ESPN’s Bill Connelly. The model has heaped some love on Ohio State over the last few years and we like to see where things stand from year-to-year, month to month, and week to week.

Early on before the season, the SP+ was bullish on the Buckeyes. And it makes sense because the model takes into account things like historical performance of recent years, recruiting, and returning talent. That’s always going to bode well for a program like OSU. But since the season started, Ohio State has dropped a wee bit in the SP+. But what goes into the ratings, bleeps, and bloops of the model?

According to ESPN:

“The SP+ is intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a resume ranking that gives credit for big wins or particularly brave scheduling — no good predictive system is. It is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football. If you’re lucky or unimpressive in a win, your rating will probably fall. If you’re strong and unlucky in a loss, it will probably rise.”

OK. Kind of makes sense, right? Ohio State wasn’t entirely impressive against Notre Dame, looked a bit better against Arkansas State, and then blew the doors off of Toledo.

But where are the Buckeyes after that 77-point output? Here is what the newly released top 25 of the SP+ looks like, with Ohio State still very near the top.

The last release of the ESPN SP+ Rankings just dropped and there’s a bit of a surprise when it comes to where Ohio State lands. Routinely sitting at No. 2, just behind Alabama all throughout the preseason, ESPN resident analytics expert Bill Connelly reportedly tweaked his formula a bit and the Buckeyes have now fallen.

Understandably so, there is some secrecy surrounding the special sauce that goes into these rankings since it is a proprietary thing developed and managed by Connelly, but we’ll never know why OSU dropped.

However, according to ESPN’s website, “the SP+ Rankings 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.”

The rest of the rankings have some modest changes from the last one we saw as well, but in totality, things look right about what you’d expect with a few surprises. Alabama remains No. 1, but there’s now a new No. 2 with Ohio State slipping.

Here is the latest top 25 of the ESPN SP+ Rankings (subscription required) and where the Buckeyes now land as we get ready to ramp things up for the 2022 season.

Ohio State football has continually been at or near the top of ESPN’s SP+ Rankings over the last few years. It’s a predictive formula that Bill Connelly manages and includes returning production, recruiting, recent history, and other data elements that — according to ESPN — are built as a “tempo and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football … These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information that we have been able to gather to date.”

With so many skill players returning on the offensive side of the ball and with the recent success on the field and recruiting, you would naturally expect Ohio State to be pretty high on the projections for the 2022 season. You would not be wrong.

In fact, the ESPN SP+ Rankings projections (subscription required) have Ohio State among the top few teams in the country, but how high exactly? We go through the top 25 for you based on whatever formula goes into making the college football sausage.