We're less than six months from the start of the 2025 college football season. While the rhythm of the offseason has changed significantly in recent years and we know rosters won't be set until after the spring transfer window has closed, it's almost never too early to preview and projecting the coming season as best we can.
We've completed the first step in that process: the posting of the initial returning production rankings. Now it's time for Step 2. Based on current rosters, it's time to post the initial SP+ ratings for the 2025 season.
I base SP+ projections on three primary factors, weighted by their predictiveness:
1. Returning production. The returning production numbers are based on rosters I have updated as much as possible to account for transfers and attrition. Combine last year's SP+ ratings and adjustments based on current returning production numbers, and you're pretty far down the projections road. In fact, this factor accounts for more than 60% of the overall projection at this point.
2. 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 both the past few years of recruiting rankings and the quality of incoming transfers, and it accounts for about 14% of the current projection.
3. Recent history. Using a chunk of information from previous seasons gives us a good measure of overall program health. It stands to reason that a team that has played well for one year is less likely to duplicate that effort than a team that has been good for years on end (and vice versa), right? This factor accounts for a little more than 20% of the projection, and it focuses only on what happened within the past three seasons. I used to use a weighted history stretching back five years, but that's a less effective approach now with the changes in the sport.
I will update these numbers in May and August after there have been further transfers and roster changes, and my annual preview series will begin after the May numbers are posted. But for now, let's establish the 2025 hierarchy.
A reminder on SP+: It's 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. Along those same 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.
In addition to the rankings of every FBS team (overall, offense, defense and special teams), we'll look at conference breakdowns and how SP+ matches up with the eyeball test in terms of which teams seem to be overrated and which could be underrated at this early stage.
Jump to a section:
SP+ rankings
Breakdown by conference
Teams to buy, sell
Initial 2025 SP+ rankings
Here are the full rankings, now featuring 136 teams with the addition of Delaware and Missouri State.
Conference-by-conference breakdown
One of my main takeaways from the returning production rankings was the potential for crowding atop the rankings. Of 2024's year-end top seven teams in SP+, five currently rank in the triple digits in returning production. But some of the teams that finished in the teens and 20s in SP+, not too far away, return far more production. If the transfer portal is doing anything to help the sport and its parity, it comes from allowing college football's second tier to inch closer to its first.
At the end of 2023, the difference between the SP+ ratings of the No. 2 (Georgia) and No. 16 (Texas A&M) teams was 15.6 points; at the moment, the difference between No. 2 and No. 16 is just 10.7 points. We've got 14 teams within a touchdown of the top five and 21 within a touchdown of the top 10. Remember how messy the 2024 regular season was, especially early on? It wouldn't take too much for 2025 to get even messier in that regard. And in this house, we love mess.
That said, there's no change in what conference can claim to be the deepest in FBS -- the SEC. There are lots of ways to determine conference quality, and if you were to look at only the top few teams, the Big Ten would grade out quite well. But since the Big Ten tends to have far more dead weight -- last season, the SEC had one team that finished worse than 52nd in SP+, while the Big Ten had seven -- looking at averages favors the SEC. And despite a lack of top-15 teams, averages favor the Big 12 over the ACC in the battle for No. 3.
Some conferences are far more crowded near the top than others, but here are the three teams with the highest current rankings in each conference:
SEC: No. 2 Alabama, No. 4 Georgia, No. 7 Texas
Big Ten: No. 1 Ohio State, No. 3 Penn State, No. 6 Oregon
Big 12: No. 19 Kansas State, No. 26 TCU, No. 27 BYU
ACC: No. 11 Clemson, No. 14 Miami, No. 18 SMU
Sun Belt: No. 47 James Madison, No. 62 South Alabama, No. 74 Louisiana
AAC: No. 50 Tulane, No. 52 Memphis, No. 60 Army
MWC: No. 31 Boise State, No. 70 UNLV, No. 85 San José State
C-USA: No. 59 Liberty, No. 94 Western Kentucky, No. 102 Jacksonville State
MAC: No. 72 Ohio, No. 75 Toledo, No. 96 Buffalo
In the Mountain West and Conference USA, the conference races start out as, well, non-races. Boise State is projected 10.6 points ahead of the MWC's second-best team, UNLV (which is at least 4.6 points ahead of everyone else), while Liberty is 8.7 points ahead of everyone else in C-USA. But even if this portends a couple of dull conference races, we luckily have the Big 12. It should provide enough mess for at least three conferences by itself.
Number of teams within 7 points of top of conference
8: Big 12
5: AAC, SEC
4: ACC, Sun Belt
3: Big Ten, MAC
1: C-USA, MWC
While Kansas State starts out a little ahead of the Big 12 pack, the conference has seven teams ranked between 26th and 36th, including last year's major Big 12 championship contenders (Arizona State, Iowa State, BYU), a couple of late 2024 risers (TCU, Baylor), a major bounce-back candidate (Utah) and a team with one of the best transfer classes in the country (Texas Tech). This is going to be fun.
SP+ vs. conventional wisdom
Stats and eyeballs tend to agree most of the time ... but not all the time. Let's compare the rankings above to Mark Schlabach's ESPN Way-Too-Early Top 25 to see where the biggest disagreements lie.
Sell, sell, sell!
As a general rule, SP+ tends to do a better job of finding teams that are overrated than those that are underrated. Last February, I listed five teams in the "Sell!" section, and they went from a combined 43-22 in 2023 to 24-37 in 2024. Who from Schlabach's list does SP+ not seem to trust?
Last year's Big 12 close-game winners (Arizona State, Iowa State, Texas Tech). ASU, ISU and Tech are all among that huge batch of potential Big 12 contenders, but they were a combined 17-4 in one-score finishes last season, 12-3 in conference play. They're 11th, 14th and "also considered" on Schlabach's list, but SP+ is far lower on all of them (29th, 28th and 33rd, respectively).
All three teams are talented and experienced enough to contend, and in Arizona State's case, the Sun Devils reached a new level of play late in the season, stomping Iowa State in the Big 12 championship and nearly beating Texas in the College Football Playoff. Maybe that was a sign of a leap that they can continue into 2025, but all we know for sure is that the god of close games is incredibly fickle, and in the Big 12 race, the team that took the tight ones one year doesn't tend to do so the next.
Last year's Big Ten upstarts (Illinois, Indiana). After going 11-2 and securing a well-earned spot in the CFP (but losing quarterback Kurtis Rourke and quite a few of last year's stars), Indiana landed 17th on Schlabach's list. Illinois, meanwhile, went 10-3 and ranks third in returning production; they're 13th per Schlabach. But SP+ ranks these teams 24th and 25th, respectively. The Hoosiers are lower because they're just outside the top 40 in returning production and have no strong recent history on which to lean. The Illini, meanwhile, went 5-1 in one-score games -- they won two in overtime and one with a long touchdown in the closing seconds -- and finished 2024 ranked only in the 30s in SP+. They project to improve, but the aforementioned fickle god of close games might render their record worse.
The state of South Carolina (Clemson, South Carolina). Clemson ended up as the first-ever bid thief of the 12-team CFP era, knocking off SMU in the ACC championship game and earning a spot in the field despite ranking outside the top 12. The Tigers damn near stole that bid from rival South Carolina, which rode a late-season hot streak to a 9-3 regular-season finish before falling to close-games master Illinois in a feisty Cheez-It Citrus Bowl. Schlabach ranks the Tigers seventh and the Gamecocks 10th, and while SP+ isn't particularly low on either team, it still ranks them four and six spots lower, respectively. This season will be a good measure of each team's ceiling -- especially Clemson's, considering the Tigers rank first nationally in returning production. They haven't looked like a genuine national title contender since 2019 or 2020. Can experience push them back into the sport's top tier?
Texas? This one's interesting. Along with Ohio State, the Longhorns are among the two teams most likely to start the season No. 1 in the preseason polls. They're second on Schlabach's list. They've got Arch Manning taking over for Quinn Ewers at quarterback, their linebackers are spectacular, and they've been to two straight CFPs. There's plenty to like. But SP+ wasn't ridiculously high on them last season -- they finished seventh overall -- and they currently rank 103rd in returning production. To believe in the Horns as a top-two team is to believe in the Arch Effect, I guess. That might turn out to be real, but SP+ obviously isn't programmed for it. They start out seventh.
Buy, buy, buy!
Last year's six "Buy!" teams were a mixed bag. SP+ nailed Iowa State and Miami, and Texas A&M improved a bit, but let's just say that picking Michigan, Alabama and Florida State to hold steady in the top 10 didn't turn out all that well. The three teams combined to win 21 fewer games in 2024 than 2023. That makes the first two teams on this year's list pretty funny.
Last year's fallen royalty (Alabama, Michigan). Let's double down! Both the Crimson Tide and Wolverines lost national title coaches after 2023 -- something SP+ wasn't programmed to account for (but will be soon) -- and struggled. Bama quarterback Jalen Milroe wasn't a wonderful stylistic fit for what Kalen DeBoer usually wants to do offensively, and while the Tide had some great performances and suffered a couple of statistically unlikely losses, they also scored just 44 total points in their last three games.
They enter 2025 in a state of flux with Milroe leaving and offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb rejoining DeBoer after a year in the pros. If you're doubting the post-Nick Saban Tide -- as Schlabach does, ranking them 12th overall -- it makes sense. But SP+ liked last year's Tide quite a bit and now sees a Bama team that still recruits really well and ranks in the top 30 in returning production despite losing its QB. It overestimated the Tide last year and might be doing so again at No. 2, but if DeBoer and Grubb get the QB position right, the ceiling is still massively high.
Hey, speaking of needing a QB ... hello, Michigan! Sherrone Moore's first season succeeding Jim Harbaugh saw a black hole at the position, with either Davis Warren's low-upside passing or Alex Orji's run-only approach. Warren will return in 2025, and Fresno State's Mikey Keene moves to Ann Arbor to hopefully assure a higher floor while Michigan waits on blue-chip freshman Bryce Underwood to get up to speed. That Michigan finished 8-5 and 26th overall, with wins over Ohio State and Alabama (one of those statistically unlikely results I mentioned above), with dreadful quarterback play and epic turnover was an accomplishment in its own right. SP+ is projecting a solid step forward as the turnover eases. Schlabach has the Wolverines 21st, but SP+ has them eight spots higher.
The SEC's upper middle class (Missouri, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas A&M). When Schlabach is putting together the Way Too Early, he takes into account both assumed quality and potential wins and losses. SP+ only cares about the former. As mentioned above, the SEC remains the sport's deepest conference (and best recruiting conference, which obviously plays a role in these projections), even if the Big Ten has as many or more top-tier title contenders. And all five of the teams mentioned here rank more than 10 spots higher in SP+ than they do on Schlabach's list. But they'll also probably lose lots of games. That's how conference depth works. OU is projected 20th, but its average projected win total is just 6.3 thanks to a ridiculous schedule. Among these five teams should come a couple of CFP contenders and a couple of disappointments, but from a power ratings perspective, they all have top-20 potential.
Iowa. The anti-Illinois. Iowa went 8-5 last season but lost three games by a combined 7 points and finished a solid 16th in SP+. Kirk Ferentz is almost perfectly .500 in one-score games in his head coaching career (he's 66-67 over 26 seasons and was 29-20 in the nine seasons before 2024), so the close-game bounces aren't automatically going to keep going against the Hawkeyes in 2025. The Iowa D is one of the best plug-and-play units in the country but has quite a few difference-makers to replace, so there are some questions there to answer, but the Hawkeyes are nicely experienced overall. They were an "also considered" team on Schlabach's list, but SP+ sees a team, at No. 21, that's only a couple of breaks away from returning to the land of double-digit wins.
Miami? We're also evidently doubling down on Miami. Mario Cristobal's Hurricanes saw a nice breakthrough in 2024, rising from 7-6 and 28th in SP+ to 10-3 and 10th. Obviously that improvement came with disappointment in the form of a defensive collapse that led to a couple of upset losses and knocked the Canes out of the CFP. And with Cam Ward, leading rusher Damien Martinez and Ward's top three receivers all gone, it's easy to assume a stumble. Schlabach ranks them 23rd, which honestly sounds about right to me, but SP+ sees a team, at No. 14, capable of producing similar results as last year in 2025. Cristobal brought in six defensive transfers who combined for 52 FBS starts last season, and there's potential for a defensive rebound. Meanwhile, quarterback Carson Beck brings his 3,485 passing yards from Georgia, which statistically dampened the loss of Ward. Ward's otherworldly 2024 play leaves a pretty high bar to clear, though. We'll see.