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

The world's longest offseason is almost over, and what might be the most anticipated college football season in ages is upon us. We've got new super megaconferences to sort through and an expanded 12-team CFP with all its inclusiveness to prepare for. According to ESPN Analytics, 47% of the teams have at least a 5% chance of reaching the playoff. But first: SP+ rankings and projections!

Below are my final SP+ projections for the 2024 college football season. As always, these are based on three primary factors: returning production (final rankings for which you can find at the bottom of this piece), recent recruiting and recent history. How good have you been recently? Whom do you have coming back? How good are the players replacing those you don't have coming back? That's loosely what we ask when we're setting expectations for a team; it's also what these projections attempt to do objectively.

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:

The preseason polls don't differ much from the top of the SP+ projections, and frankly, that's disappointing. It's a lot more fun to rail against outrageous, irrational bowl bumps and whatnot, but the top five in the AP and coaches polls are the same as the SP+ top five (albeit in a slightly different order), and no team in the AP top 11 is more than two spots away