ESPN’s Bill Connelly recently updated its college football SP+ Rankings and you are going to like where Ohio State is ranked. But first, a quick primer on what goes into making the sausage for this well-known model:
Returning production. The returning production numbers are based on rosters I have updated as much as humanly possible to account for transfers and attrition. The combination of last year’s SP+ ratings and adjustments based on returning production makes up about two-thirds of the projections formula.
Recent recruiting. This piece informs us of the caliber of a team’s potential replacements (and/or new stars) in the lineup. It is determined by the past few years of recruiting rankings in diminishing order (meaning the most recent class carries the most weight). This is also impacted by the recruiting rankings of incoming transfers, an acknowledgment that the art of roster management is now heavily dictated by the transfer portal.
Recent history. Using a sliver of information from the previous four seasons or so gives us a good measure of overall program health.
(One other reminder: SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking, and along those lines, these projections aren’t intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather.)
All of that out of the way, you’ll be happy to know that the Buckeyes sit high atop the SP+ Rankings at No. 1 with an overall score of 29.5. Broken down further, OSU is ranked No. 7 in offense (39.6), No. 2 in defense (10.1), No. 11 in special teams (0..3).
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So, what other teams are up in the top ten? Ohio State is just above Alabama (27.9), Penn State (27.7), Georgia (26.9), Texas (26.4), Notre Dame (24.9), Oregon (24.7), Clemson (23.3), LSU (22.1), and Michigan (21.5).
These things always change — not so much from here to the preseason — but once games get underway. Ohio State has a lot of unknowns, but still a lot of returning talent that should be good enough to jump in and be the next man up.
We’ll keep an eye on these and other rankings as we traverse the offseason and head towards fall camp.
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This article originally appeared on Buckeyes Wire: Ohio State football sits high on ESPN’s updated SP+ Rankings
