Texas A&M Football: Breaking down ESPN’s SP+ rating for the Aggies
As “talking season” winds down for Texas A&M football with the first real college football weekend of the season imminent (Nebraska-Northwestern and Vandy-Hawaii notwithstanding), many of us are ready to dispense with preseason projections and rankings and just play the games already. We are all ready to see the product on the field, and for Texas A&M fans, there’s certainly a lot of curiosity regarding just how high this team can fly this season.
On the heels of a 2022 recruiting class that achieved the mark of best-ever, and following a 2021 season that ended disappointingly in the win/loss category, I think we all feel that the team should exceed the much-maligned 8-4 mark of last year.
But what will this year’s team really look like? Are such expectations reasonable? Depending on who you ask and whether or not their wardrobe includes burnt-orange (or crimson!), you’d get a bevy of different answers. We won’t really know until they take the field at 11 AM CT on Saturday, but different advanced stats systems can help us get a picture of what kind of team we might be looking at.
My favorite statistical system to look at is Bill Connelly’s (of ESPN) SP+ ratings. Here’s a quick rundown of SP+ from the man himself:
"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…"
So how can this type of system be useful for a preseason prediction? Connelly explains it this way:
"These are based on three primary factors: returning production… recent recruiting and recent history. How good have you been recently? Who 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 subjectively; it’s also what these projections attempt to do objectively."
SP+ ratings are calculated by a formula that gives numbers for both the offense and defense. These numbers are what, according to that formula, this team could on average expect to score on the hypothetical exactly-average FBS team (on the offensive side) and have scored against them by the hypothetical exactly-average FBS team (on the defensive side). So, higher numbers are better for the offensive rating, and lower numbers are better for the defensive rating.
Later into the season, a number for special teams is also added based on your performance in that phase of the game. Then, the defensive number is subtracted from the offensive number (plus the ST number, later in the season) to give a rating that is supposed to resemble how much better (or worse) your team is than the “average team”.
So with all that said, how does SP+ view this year’s Aggie squad? According to the projections, Texas A&M has a rating of 19.5, ranking 8th in the country. This comes from an offensive number of 32.2 and a defensive number of 12.7. Those numbers rank 41st and 3rd in the country, respectively.
For context, A&M started last season with an overall ranking of 21.6 (9th in the country), rating 36.7 offensively and 15.1 defensively (21st and 6th in the country, respectively). They ended last season with an overall ranking of 21.1 (6th in the country!), rating 33.6 offensively and 14.9 defensively (35th and 7th in the country, respectively). There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s dive into it.