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College football 2024 returning production rankings: 134 teams

AP Photo/Sam Craft

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!)