College football's roster carousel never ends, but as we approach February's national signing day and the official end of the 2024 recruiting cycle, things have at least slowed down a bit on the personnel front. Coaching changes have assured that some schools could still see transfer portal entries, but now's as good a time as any to take stock.
Around this time of year, I typically spit out the first SP+ projections of the new season, based on a forever-changing combination of returning production, recruiting and recent history. As always, those projections stem from three primary questions: How good has your team been recently? How well has it recruited? And who returns from last year's roster? SP+ projections come next week, but let's go ahead and deal with that last question. Who returns a majority of last year's production (or has done the best job of importing production from another team)? Who is starting from scratch?
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 and has had to shift a ton with the rising number of transfers. But the gist remains the same: High or low returning production percentages correlate well with improvement and regression. They might not guarantee a good or bad team, but they can still tell us a lot.
With that in mind, here are the returning production percentages and rankings for all 134 FBS teams for 2024. (Yes, we're up to 134 teams. Hello, Kennesaw State!)