Tag: S&P Rankings

Ranking Big Ten football teams by 2023 projected SP+ Rankings

Here’s how Ohio State football stacks up against other Big Ten members when it comes to projected SP+ rankings for 2023. #GoBucks

In case you missed it Tuesday, ESPN’s resident analytics expert, Bill Connelly, came out with the very early 2023 projected SP+ Rankings (subscription required) for all college football teams, and yeah, Ohio State is mighty high up the list.

It’s fun to not just compare the Buckeyes against the nation, but also its Big Ten colleagues like Michigan, Penn State, and Wisconsin to see what the SP+ Rankings say about what the pecking order might be in the conference next season. There are some mild surprises when diving into the numbers, and it makes for fun debate.

As a reminder, the SP+ Rankings take into account things like returning production, recent recruiting, and historical success, but it’s not an exact formula by any means. It’s a proprietary recipe cooked up by Connelly that slices and dices things we don’t know much about.

Regardless, for your viewing and dissecting pleasure, here’s a look at all fourteen teams as ranked by the early, projected SP+ Rankings for 2023. As an added bonus, we throw in future Big Ten members USC and UCLA because — well, we can.

Final S&P college football rankings are out. Where is Ohio State?

The final S&P college football rankings were released for the 2021 season. Where did Ohio State end up when all the dust settled?

By all accounts and measures, Ohio State had a highly successful year. Yeah, the measuring stick involves winning a Big Ten Championship (check), making the College Football Playoff (check), and winning a national championship (doh), but seeing how the Buckeyes weren’t even supposed to play, we’ll all take it.

It could have been an even special year if Ohio State hadn’t run into an absolute buzz saw in the national championship game down in Miami against Alabama. The Bucks were shorthanded, but even with a full complement of players, it was highly unlikely OSU was going to beat one of the best college football teams I’ve ever seen play in person.

That being said, the latest S&P Rankings are out, and we don’t have to tell you who is No. 1, that belongs to the Crimson Tide by a wide margin. However, things were much closer behind that. So where did Ohio State end up when it comes to ranking a team’s strength and predictive measure of a team going forward? Well, we’re glad you asked.

Where Ohio State ranked in the final 2020 S&P Rankings

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Ohio State regains No. 1 spot in ESPN’s SP+ Rankings

After dropping to No. 2 recently for the first time in over a year, the Ohio State football team regained No. 1 in the latest SP+ Rankings.

We have good news and we have bad news. The good news is that the Ohio State football team has regained the No. 1 ranking in the latest release of ESPN’s SP+ Rankings. The bad news is that the Buckeyes’ lead is teetering on the edge after being relinquished for the first time in over a year to Alabama recently.

Some nuances of the metrics can be attributed to Ohio State missing out on playing enough games, but a lot of it has to do with the Crimson Tide looking like — well, the Crimson Tide and beating up on every team it plays not named Mississipi State. The reality is that there are a whole lot of metrics and measurements that can go into Alabama’s six games played vs. only three for OSU. But still, we don’t really know what goes into the secret sauce here when it comes to the data sets, so we’ll just have to trust the brainchild of Bill Connelly for now.

Also, in a bit of a quirk, Ohio State leapfrogged ‘Bama while not playing a game last week because of some adjustments to the Buckeyes’ opponents’ metrics. Take that for what it’s worth.

Ohio State’s total now is a rating of 28.4, just one-tenth of a point ahead of No. 2 Alabama’s 28.3. Behind those two, and rounding out the top ten are Wisconsin (26.5), Clemson (26.1), Notre Dame (21.0), Florida (19.8), BYU (19.2), Georgia (19.1), Cincinnati (18.6), and Oregon (18.1).

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As a reminder, the SP+ Ratings are designed to predict the future performance of a team. In Connelly’s own words, he designed the rating as “a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency.”

Raise your hand with me if you’re still at a loss after that description. The best we can tell you is that it determines the strength of a team regardless of its win/loss record.

It’s fun to keep an eye on this as the season wears on because it has historically shown a pretty good gauge on how good a team is. It’s not perfect by any means, but anytime someone’s keeping score, it’s good to be No. 1 right?

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