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Ole Miss football lands inside Top 20 of ESPN's 2023 preseason SP+ rankings

11by:Jake Thompson•02/14/23•

JakeThompsonOn3

Jaxson Dart
Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart and head coach Lane Kiffin

Football never really ends anymore these days, especially the new world landscape at the college level and Ole Miss is right in the mix.

With the major recruiting cycles for the 2023 season completed, outside of some potential spring and summer portal moves, the look to this fall begins. That includes the very early preseason SP+ rankings by ESPN’s Bill Connelly.

The unique rankings were released by Connelly on Tuesday giving an early glimpse at what to expect in the next college football season. As a refresher, the SP+ rankings are based by Connelly on three primary factors (returning production, recent recruiting and recent history) and weighted by their predictiveness.

When it comes to the returning production it is weighted by a team’s current roster after the comings and goings of players via the portal and mid-year high school enrollees.

For Ole Miss that category bodes well for them on the offensive side of the ball with what is returning, specifically with quarterback Jaxson Dart and running back Quinshon Judkins. The recruiting category also plays into the Rebels favor.

The list of new Rebels joining the team for spring practice features 13 Division I transfers that On3 currently ranks as the No. 3 class in the team transfer rankings.

Ole Miss claimed four of the top 50 available transfers, according to On3.

With all of that taken into consideration and Ole Miss football’s recent history over the seasons it lands at No. 18.

Ole Miss received an overall rating of 16.7, which to put in perspective Georgia was No. 1 at 31.7. The Bulldogs ended the 2022 season ranked No. 1 as well after its second straight College Football Playoff national championship.

There are also offense and defense SP+ ratings. For Ole Miss its offense rating is 38.5 and good for 18th best while defense is 21.8 and 33rd best. The rankings are out of 133 FBS teams.

The Southeastern Conference finished atop the conference overall ratings with an average of 16.6, putting Ole Miss just above it. The Rebels were the sixth best SEC team behind Georgia, Alabama (4th), Tennessee (6th), LSU (7th) and Texas A&M (17th).

Connelly’s SP+ ratings are 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 are not 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 up-to-date information Connelly has been able to get on each team.

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