Earlier this week, we talked a lot about the ESPN SP+ ratings that were released ahead of spring football across the nation. While there are a lot of rankings in the world of college football to determine how good each team is, the SP+, in my opinion, is one of the most valuable that we have to look at.
If you are unfamiliar with the SP+ rankings, it’s not too complicated. They are based on the following: Returning production — how many players from last year’s roster are still on the team; Recent recruiting — how the last few classes of recruiting stack up, with more weight placed on the most recent signees; Recent history — quite simply, how good has the team been over the past 2-4 years. More weight has also been placed on the transfer portal in the past couple of years, and the amount of production that each team is expecting to receive from incoming players via the portal.
When ESPN released the full SP+ earlier this week, I was immediately taken aback by how many Pac-12 teams were within the top-25. The Pac-12 had the 4th-highest average SP+ rating of all the conferences, but 5 teams were in the top 25, and 6 were in the top 31.
It’s also impressive how close the Pac-12 teams are to each other in the rankings. The top four teams — Oregon, USC, Washington, and Utah — are all separated by just 2.9 points, and both UCLA and Oregon State aren’t far behind. In a sense, these ratings told us a bit of what we already knew — the top of the conference is incredibly strong — but it gave great insight to just how strong it really is.
Here is where the entire conference ended up in th 2023 preseason SP+ ratings.