College football's final 2025 preseason SP+ rankings, takeaways - ESPN

Media days are over. The polls are out. Early reports are that your team is looking absolutely fantastic in fall camp — they have lots of physicality, and the competition levels are off the charts!

We've passed most of the mile markers in college football's long offseason, and the first games are less than two weeks away. Let's cross another landmark off the list: It's time to release the final preseason SP+ rankings. If you've been following along this offseason, through the initial February release and May update, the top of the rankings won't surprise you very much. But let's take stock one last time before Irish Farmageddon (Iowa State vs. Kansas State in Dublin) kicks off and the 2025 journey begins.

As always: 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 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 year. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date.

Here are the full rankings (overall, offense, defense and special teams) along with each team's average projected win total and strength-of-schedule ranking.

Since the May rankings, I've continued to update rosters for late transfers and fall camp injuries. But the largest changes came from some tweaking on my end — some teams with especially noteworthy luck (good or bad) saw some shifts, and after quite a bit of experimenting, I ended up tamping down the overall top-to-bottom spread of points. Translation: The top teams' ratings aren't quite as high as they were in May.

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