Where Michigan football ranks in ESPN's updated SP+ ratings
Michigan Wolverines football finished last season No. 3 in the national rankings, after winning the Big Ten and advancing to the College Football Playoff. It’s a new year, but the Maize and Blue are once again expected to compete for titles. ESPN.com’s Bill Connelly updated his SP+ rankings for the first time since February (and will do so again before the 2022 campaign begins), which had the Wolverines ranked fourth in the country.
Here’s how Connelly, an analytics guru, defines SP+ as “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.”
Three three factors that Connelly uses for offseason projections are returning production (which makes up over two-thirds of the formula), recent recruiting and recent history.
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Michigan ranks 67th nationally in returning production. The Wolverines are set to bring back 87 percent of their offensive production — 13th-most in the country — but only 43 percent on the defensive side of the ball.
Over the last three recruiting cycles, per the On3 Consensus, Michigan has ranked ninth (2022), 14th (2021) and ninth (2020). And outside of a 2-4 season in 2020 that has seen been proved to be a blip on the radar, the Maize and Blue have been one of the Big Ten’s top teams.
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Under eighth-year head coach Jim Harbaugh, Michigan has won 10-plus games four times, and during his tenure (since 2015), it’s one of five Power Five teams to stack up eight or more regular-season victories in each full-length season.
SP+ predicts Michigan will have the sixth-best offense and 20th-best defense this coming season.
While ranking fourth theoretically would place Michigan in the four-team national playoff, the Wolverines weren’t the highest rated team among Big Ten members. Ohio State took the top spot overall. The Buckeyes won 11 games last season, including a Rose Bowl victory, and look to be stellar once again. They return 76 percent of their production, the 24th-most in the country and top mark in the Big Ten.
Alabama and Georgia were the other two teams ahead of Michigan, in that order.
Wisconsin joined Michigan and Ohio State in the top 10, ranking 10th, and Penn State (13), Michigan State (16), Minnesota (21), Iowa (27) and Nebraska (29) all slotted top 30. The positions of the rest of the Big Ten teams are: Purdue (35), Maryland (47), Indiana (72), Rutgers (78), Illinois (82) and Northwestern (85).
Michigan’s non-conference opponents all slotted worse than 85th, with Colorado State checking in 87th, Hawai’i slotting 121st and UConn sitting at 129th.
