• The Oso
  • Posts
  • Preseason Polls and Rankings and Thoughts on What They Might Mean for Baylor

Preseason Polls and Rankings and Thoughts on What They Might Mean for Baylor

The Preseason AP Poll and Final SP+ Preseason Rankings are out. Where do Big 12 teams sit and what do the rankings mean for Baylor's expectations?

Author

Peter Pope
August 13, 2024

We’re around two and a half weeks until the season starts. Anticipation is building, hope springs eternal. Rankings come out, and it’s time to discuss why your team is FAR too low and the team you hate is far too high.

The AP poll dropped on Monday. For a fanbase wondering whether their team will get back to bowl eligibility, the event passed mostly unmarked. Nevertheless, here’s the full poll, courtesy of the RedditCFB account on Twitter (for readability):

Head here to see the AP’s full poll, but as you can see, the Big 12 places several in the poll, though none in the Top 10. Utah tops the Big 12 entrants at 12, followed by Oklahoma State at 17, Kansas State at 18, Arizona at 21 and Kansas at 22. Iowa State and West Virginia also received votes, and Colorado received one vote. Not shocking: Baylor doesn’t sniff the list. That’s fine, we know what we’re about this season.

Final Preseason SP+ Rankings Released

We here at The Oso are big fans of SP+ and other advanced metrics. PodcastDelOso used the post-spring SP+ rankings to analyze strength of conference schedules in their Big 12 Power Hour preview. Bill C., the mastermind behind the stat, released his final preseason rankings on Tuesday. You can see where all 134 FBS programs rank on ESPN+, but here’s where the Big 12 falls. In parentheses I put where they ranked in the post-spring SP+ rankings that Bill did after Spring Ball concluded:

17. Kansas State (no change)
18. Utah (no change)
20. Oklahoma State (no change)
28. Arizona (24, -4 spots)
30. Iowa State (no change)
33. Kansas (37, +4 spots)
34. West Virginia (no change)
38. TCU (36, -2 spots)
41. Texas Tech (42, +1 spot)
45. UCF (48, +3 spots)
53. Baylor (61, +8 spots)
60. Colorado (69, +9 spots)
62. Cincinnati (69, +7 spots)
69. BYU (67, -2 spots)
76. Houston (79, +3 spots)
79. Arizona State (88, +9 spots)

With the exception of Kansas jumping over WVU and Cincinnati hopping BYU, SP+ projects the Big 12 to finish largely the same as it did after the spring, but with the third and fourth quadrants of the Big 12 projected a touch better than before. SP+ now projects Baylor to finish just outside the top 50, instead of in the 60s like before.

As a reminder, Bill defines SP+ thusly:

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, 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.

The raw SP+ rating measures how much better or worse each team is than a hypothetical “average” college football team. In these final preseason rankings, the closest teams to the “average” are Illinois and Cincinnati, ranked at 61 and 62. At the end of the regular season last year, the closest was 5-7 Nebraska, ranked 65th overall.

So What? What Does This Mean for Baylor?

Preseason rankings are a fickle mistress. While polls are wildly subjective and each voter carries his or her own subjective biases into the equation, at least SP+ is an objective system. Whatever biases it may have are built into the formula, not some hatred for your favorite or love for your rival. Regardless, you may be wondering what Baylor’s ranking means for expectations.

If so, take heart! Last season, Texas Tech ranked 53rd in SP+ at the end of the regular season, exactly where Baylor sits in the preseason rankings. The Red Raiders finished the season at 6-6, qualifying for the Independence Bowl. They squared off against California, who was also 6-6 and ranked 61 in the post-championship week SP+ rankings. That said, three Power 5 teams finished in the SP+ top 50 and were not bowl eligible: TCU (40), Florida (42), and Washington State (47). All were 5-7… their relatively high SP+ ranks given their records demonstrates that they were good teams with some horrific close-game luck.

Meanwhile, several teams from the Power 5 finished outside the SP+ top 50 and reached bowl eligibility, including Tech, Cal, Rutgers (59), Syracuse (68), Georgia Tech (69 nice). The lowest? Boston College, who went 6-6 and finished 81st in pre-bowl SP+.

Naturally, these metrics will change drastically once the actual games are played and we have results on the field. But if the 2023 regular season SP+ rankings are any guide, Baylor will be, at the very least, right on the edge of bowl eligibility. A finish at 53 in SP+ would represent a 45-spot jump in SP+ ranking, a phenomenal result. It may be a tall order, but not an impossible one.