It's that time of year again. With the 2022 college football signing class in the books, we have the components we need to put together this season's initial SP+ projections.
As always, the projections stem from three primary questions: How good has your team been recently? How well has it recruited? And perhaps most importantly,: Who returns from last year's roster?
Full SP+ projections will come out Wednesday, but for now our focus is on that last question. For decades, we have used returning starters as a proxy for measuring experience, mainly because we haven't had anything better to use. But for a few years now, I've been attempting to expand how we measure returning production. The formula I have created shifts with each new year of data, but it's based on what has the greatest impact on year-to-year improvement and regression.
First the data, then the explanation. Here are the returning production percentages and rankings for all 131 FBS teams: