The first preseason SP+ rankings for 2024 are out, and they serve to underline just how brutal a schedule Florida has this year.
What are the SP+ ratings? Formerly known as S&P+ until ESPN hired its creator and Standard & Poors sent an email to the Disney legal department, SP+ is the premier advanced stat rating system in college football. Bill Connelly has been producing the ratings for well over a decade and refines them annually to keep them accurate and relevant with all the changes in the game of late.
In Connelly’s own words:
It’s 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. 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 season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date.
That’s a better summary than I could write.
An SP+ rating is a single number that represents how many points better or worse than a perfectly average opponent that a team would be on a neutral field. A rating of 14.0 means the team is two touchdowns better than a perfectly average team; a rating of -10.0 means they’re a touchdown and field goal worse than a perfectly average team.
Last year’s Gators finished with a rating of 6.8, so they were about a touchdown better than perfectly average on a neutral field. That doesn’t get you too far when you play in the SEC and have multiple P5 teams in the non-conference, but there you have it. They were 41st nationally, 0.1 ahead of 10-4 Oklahoma State. If only UF could’ve played in the Big 12.
Anyway, right now Florida has a slightly improved SP+ rating in the preseason projection compared to last year’s finish. This actually dovetails with the 5.5 over/under regular season wins mark that came out of Vegas this week. The schedule is harder this year than last, so having the same win total line is consistent with slight improvement.
The SP+ ratings for now have Florida 33rd nationally at 8.6, which for intraconference comparison is nearly the same as No. 31 Auburn’s 8.8 rating. More than solid, not spectacular, within shouting distance of the top 25 if things break well enough.
The issue is the schedule. It really is that bad. Here is how Florida’s FBS opponents rate:
1. Georgia, 34.5
4. Texas, 28.7
10. LSU, 23.5
12. Florida State, 20.0
13. Texas A&M, 19.0
15. Tennessee, 18.4
21. Miami (FL), 12.3
40. Kentucky, 5.6
42. South Carolina, 4.2
56. UCF, -0.6
74. Mississippi State, -3.3
Where have you gone, Vandy?
That’s seven opponents higher in the ratings than the Gators, with six of them higher by two scores or more and three of them higher by two touchdowns or more. Two additional opponents are below the Gators but certainly within striking distance at 3.2 or 4.4 points behind. Yikes.
Now, I would argue with some of these ratings. I don’t think LSU will be this good without Jayden Daniels. Garrett Nussmeier could be just as good a passer — no small feat, if he can pull it off — but he won’t come close to being as dangerous on the ground. A preview of FSU without its 2023 stars showed a vastly diminished team, and while I know they found some good players in the portal, the core of Mike Norvell’s early success is gone. They lost more than the sum of the parts that are off to the NFL.
But even if you adjust those teams downward by a touchdown, they’re still ahead of UF. Give Miami a Mario Cristobal haircut of a field goal for bad in-game decision making and they’re still ahead of UF.
The best hope for 2024 is simply that SP+ is underrating Florida by some appreciable amount. How might it be doing so?
To start, preseason SP+ takes last year’s rating, adjusts for returning production, and then turns some dials based on the last few years of combined recruiting and portal movement as well as performance in recent seasons. That’s what we’re working with. If something is off, it has to be in there.
One thing that’s not in there is coaching changes. If you really believe that Billy Napier upgraded the defensive staff, that would be one factor not reflected in SP+ that could push the final number upward.
Another possible factor is the quality of returning production. A team that has a lot of young guys returning has greater room to improve than one with a lot of veterans returning. More upperclassmen coming back increases consistency and raises the floor, but after a number of years most players are who they are. Meanwhile Florida will return a ton of young players who made a lot of freshman mistakes in 2023 who in theory are still in the more quickly upward sloping phase of their development.
The last piece of hope isn’t that hopeful, which is that the past three seasons are a reflection of poor culture left over from the Mullen era that Napier couldn’t fix inside of two years. The culture did get quite bad under the prior regime, and that can’t always be corrected instantly.
However if it can’t be fixed right away, a program might be in the kind of culture overhaul phase that requires more than two or three years. The higher roster churn of today’s game can help flush the bad influences out more quickly, but it also means bringing in transfers with whom the coaches have much less experience being around than high school recruits. The tradeoff for getting rid of malcontents faster is a greater danger of bringing in future malcontents in the process.
Napier has outperformed SP+ expectations for games a number of times, with the 2022 rout of South Carolina being the biggest triumph there. The system saw the Gators as a touchdown worse than the Gamecocks, but UF won the game 38-6 for a difference of 39.4. It’s still by far the largest outperformance even if you adjust for home field advantage as the next-largest such margin was outperforming the SP+ expectation by 22.4 against Tennessee last year.
Something that jumps out is that the starting margin matters. Two of the six SP+ outperformances by double digits were still losses: 2022 Tennessee (16.2) and 2023 Missouri (10.5). If the team can do that much better than the projection and still not win, it means the gap was far too big to start with.
Of course, the Gators do sometimes underperform the SP+ expectation. There were also six games where UF did more than ten points worse than expected, and two of them were still wins (’22 USF, ’23 Charlotte). That then shows how the best teams get it done: press your advantages and build so much margin of error that you can still pull out wins when you play poorly. UF just needs to get far out ahead of more than just basement-dwelling G5 teams.
So there you have it: the best analytics system says Florida should be a little better but also face a brutal schedule. It’s not something you needed an advanced degree to surmise, but at least now it’s semi-official. We’ll have to see the post-spring SP+ to be sure, that’s where things sit now.