Where is Penn State in the final preseason SP+ rankings ahead of the 2023 season?
According to every preseason poll, Penn State is a top-10 team. The Associated Press and USA Today Coaches Poll both slotted the Nittany Lions at No. 7 in their first top 25s ahead of the 2023 season. Media rankings, meanwhile, have had head coach James Franklin’s team as high as No. 4 and as low as No. 9. Now, ESPN’s highly-acclaimed SP+ model from staff writer Bill Connelly has weighed in.
The final preseason SP+ ahead of the 2023 season puts Penn State at No. 6. It is a drop of just one spot from February, when the Lions sat at No. 5 in the initial projection following the 2022 slate. Penn State, with 23.2 points, is behind Georgia (29.2), Ohio State (29), Michigan (28.6), Alabama (28.1), and LSU (23.3), respectively. Clemson (22.9), Tennessee (22.4), Texas (22.2), and USC (20.9) round out the top 10.
Connelly explains SP+ as follows:
“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, albeit with recent formula changes to account for college football’s transfer explosion. 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.”
Penn State is at the halfway mark of preseason camp
Penn State kicked off preseason camp two weeks ago today. The Nittany Lions have had a relatively healthy camp so far. No position battle winners have been picked yet. The team did hold an open practice for fans last week, however. It included a scrimmage period. And, despite rain impacting things both last Saturday and this past Monday, Franklin was happy with the work his team put in.
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“I thought we got exactly what we wanted to get out of it in terms of our first scrimmage of the year,” Franklin said. “We got a ton of reps, ton of situations covered. [On Monday], it happened again, wet ball work, which is really valuable. We always schedule practice based on the Farmers Almanac. I make that joke with the players. They look at me like I got five heads. But it is really good work for us. And then in front of the fans, it does create a different element. Seemed like everybody handled it well, looked like the fans handled it well in terms of the rules. So we’d like to continue to build on that. So I thought it was a real positive.
“Obviously, we got to make sure we’re throwing the ball enough. Because on a wet day, we focused on running the ball, and we need to be able to throw the ball to win as well as run the ball to win and when you become one dimensional, that’s not what we want and who we want to be. But either way, it was really good work and really good film.”
