ESPN's Final SP+ Rankings

[WishBone]

NORMAN — The preseason AP poll was released Monday, with less than two weeks until the 2024 college football season kicks off with the Week 0 matchup between Florida State and Georgia Tech. That wasn't the only set of rankings to be updated this week, however, as ESPN published its final preseason SP+ rankings Tuesday morning.

It was the third and final offseason update of the rankings formulated by ESPN's Bill Connelly, with the first dropping back in February, upon the completion of the 2024 recruiting cycle, and a second post-spring update released in May after spring practices and the spring transfer portal window closed.

If you're unfamiliar with SP+ rankings, it's a measure of efficiency in college football that's adjusted for tempo and opponents. As Connelly describes it, SP+ is "a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a resume ranking."

Connelly's rankings are formulated by factoring in three key categories: returning production, recent recruiting success and recent program history. The returning production is pretty straightforward (Oklahoma returns 65% of its total production from last season, which is 53rd nationally). The recent recruiting success is used to determine "the caliber of a team's potential replacement (and/or new stars) in the lineup" and is determined by the past few years of recruiting rankings, including transfers, with the most recent class carrying more weight. The latter of those three categories, recent history, is defined by what a team has done over the last two to four seasons, according to Connelly.

Oklahoma was 15th in each of the previous two 2024 offseason updates of the SP+ rankings, but the Sooners moved up two spots to 13th in the final preseason refresh published Tuesday. Oklahoma's SP+ rating of 19.8 is up from 19.3 in the May update, which was up from the 18.9 rating the Sooners received in the initial February rankings.

The Sooners have an offensive SP+ rating of 37.1, which is 17th nationally (and up marginally from 36.9 during the last rankings update), while Brent Venables' defense earned a 17.3 preseason rating, which is 13th nationally and up three spots from the summer refresh of the SP+ rankings. On the special teams front, Oklahoma remains 95th nationally with a minus-0.3 rating that was unchanged from the summer update. That aspect shouldn't come as a surprise, considering the Sooners' noted struggles in that phase of the game last season.

As Oklahoma football prepares for its first season in the new 16-team SEC, which also added Texas to the fold on July 1, six conference opponents remain ahead of the Sooners in SP+: No. 1 Georgia (34.2), No. 4 Alabama (27.8), No. 5 Texas (27.7), No. 8 Ole Miss (24.7), No. 10 LSU (23.1) and No. 11 Missouri (22.2). Oklahoma moved ahead of Texas A&M, which held the No. 13 spot in the summer update but dropped to 14th in the most recent SP+ rankings, just behind the Sooners with a 19.2 rating.

The SEC as a conference still touts the best average SP+ ranking (16.7), followed by the Big Ten (average of 10.0), making for a sizeable gap between the two leagues in terms of overall strength.

Of the six teams ahead of Oklahoma in the final preseason SP+ rankings, five of them are on the Sooners' inaugural SEC schedule. Three of those games—against Missouri, Ole Miss and LSU—are on the road, while Oklahoma will face Alabama at home and play Texas at a neutral site, as is custom for the Red River Rivalry.

It's part of why the Sooners have one of the most difficult schedules in the nation this season. That slate also includes the team's SEC opener against Tennessee (15th in SP+), Auburn (25th) and South Carolina (35th). The Sooners' nonconference schedule includes games against Tulane (65th), Houston (76th) and Temple (132nd; the third-lowest rated team in FBS). Maine is not included in these SP+ rankings, since it is an FCS program.

According to the final SP+ rankings, Oklahoma football has a 3.8% chance of winning the SEC in its first season. That's eighth among SEC teams, with Georgia (29.7%) the favorite to take home the league crown, followed by Texas (15.2%), Alabama (14.3%), Ole Miss (9.6%), LSU (8%), Missouri (7.1%) and Texas A&M (4.6%).

One final note from Connelly's breakdown of the SP+ rankings, which noted that the Sooners were among the teams that SP+ liked more than the preseason AP voters, who voted OU at No. 16.

"Since SP+ is a power rating, it can still rank Oklahoma football 13th while projecting the Sooners to win an average of only 7.6 games, just as it can rank Auburn (7.1 wins) 25th, Kentucky (7.0) 22nd and poor Florida (5.4) 23rd," Connelly wrote.....................................................from Sooners Illustrated