2024 Pre-Season College Football Rankings
Georgia looks to return to dominance, while conference newcomers aim to make a statement in their new homes.
We are about to embark upon one of the most anticipated College Football seasons ever. After a wild offseason of unprecedented realignment (so long, Pac-12), the introduction of the 12-team playoff, and the reincarnation of the fan-favorite EA Sports video game College Football 25 after a ten year hiatus, fans are champing at the bit for the season to kickoff. We are just over a week away from the season getting underway when the Florida State Seminoles travel to Dublin, Ireland to face Georgia Tech on Saturday, August 24th. Looking ahead to this season, I created a model to establish a full ranking of FBS teams.1
A Quick Model Overview
I utilized CollegeFootballData.com’s R package CFBDfastR to collect several year’s worth of data to build a model to predict a team’s Elo rating.2 This included three separate rating systems, returning player production, and new incoming talent. The specific metrics were:
Prior year end-of-season Elo rating.
Prior year end-of-season SRS rating from College Football Reference.
Prior year end-of season ESPN FPI rating.
The predicted points added (PPA) a team has returning from the prior season.3
247 Sports team recruiting ratings.
247 Sports team transfer portal ratings.
Prior year end-of-season Elo, SRS, and FPI were regressed to the mean by their ability to predict that same rating in the following season via a simple linear regression model (i.e., 2022 SRS used to predict 2023 SRS). In a simple linear regression like this, this ends up being simply the correlation between the prior year rating and following year rating (i.e., the correlation between 2022 SRS and 2023 SRS). Since the transfer portal only began to really become impactful in 2021 (while it was established in 2018, it didn’t really take off until restrictions were eased in 2021) transfer portal and recruiting were bundled into one variable in which transfer portal and recruiting rankings were combined when both stats were available. When transfer portal data was not available or not applicable, recruiting ratings were solely used. The variable importance of each of these predictors in the model is shown below.
I used the resulting model to predict Elo ratings for all teams ahead of 2024.
The Ratings and Rankings
The table below gives the full rankings, along with each team’s final Elo rating from last season and the change between the two.
The 2021 and 2022 National Champion Georgia Bulldogs top the ranks, with last year’s champ Michigan in third after losing their head coach to the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers. In their first campaign in the Big Ten, Oregon (yes, you heard that right) ranks second. Conference newcomers flood the top 25, with Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, SMU, Arizona, and Washington all calling new conferences home.
The Biggest Movers
Which teams have improved or declined the most since last year? The following table compares my projected Elo with last year’s final Elo ratings from CollegeFootballData, along with this year’s pre-season AP top-25 rankings versus the final AP rankings of 2023.
Boston College heads into this season with a 26-point improvement in Elo, followed by Oklahoma State and Deion Sanders’ Colorado Buffaloes, who are looking to improve upon last year’s relative disappointment compared to expectations. James Madison, who’s surprise season garnered much attention across the sport, is expected to fall back to earth with a projected 34-point drop in Elo.
Coming Up…
Next week I will release my full season forecast, including win-loss records for each team, predicted conference winners, and College Football Playoff projections. These ratings will be updated after each week of the season, and can be accessed on the new College Football tab on my Substack’s homepage.
So, what do you think? Did I get these rankings right?
Kennesaw State, which is transitioning from the FCS level, did not have sufficient data to model, so the Owls were given a rating of the lowest modeled team minus 1 point.
“Elo” is a rating system used to measure relative skill. Developed by Arpad Elo, it was first created for rating chess players but has since been extended by many in sports analytics to rate players and teams in Football, Baseball, and Basketball, among others. For more on the Elo system, feel free to read more here.
Per CollegeFootballData.com, Predicted Points Added uses Expected Points (the number of points that would be expected to be scored based on down, distance, and field position) to measure the outcome of a play. It takes the EP value from the beginning of a play and subtracts it from the EP value resulting from the play.
This is cool!