247: Updated bowl projections as we enter the summer

I'm surprised anyone is picking us to do that well. I'll take it though and fwiw, I agree with that projection.

OSU
Bama
Clemson
OU

playoff

Agreed, that group of teams every year makes college football less interesting. Let's shake it up again!

Is that coastal Carolina?

That would be a great season…use it as a spring board for a playoff run in 2022

quote:

---

I'm surprised anyone is picking us to do that well. I'll take it though and fwiw, I agree with that projection

---

While never 100% accurate, two of the best indicators of success over (at least) the last 20 years or so has been (1) returning production and (2) Four year recruiting rankings.

quote:

---

The Returning Talent Index
Bill Connelly, the college football stats guru for nerds like you and me (and former FO writer), has relied for a couple of years on his returning production statistic. Bill uses a weighted average of the returning stats, not players, from year to year as an indicator of who might be more successful in the upcoming season. I'm going to tweak and build on the idea of returning production, focusing on talent instead of stats and exploiting new data from the college football transfer portal.

The Returning Talent Index is simple: the index is your team's talent composite weighted by returning production, plus net transfer ratings, plus incoming recruiting ratings, normalized to a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. A returning talent index of 1.5 means your team improved by 1.5 standard deviations relative to average, and a returning talent index of -0.25 means your team got worse by a quarter of a standard deviation relative to average.

I begin by looking at the "raw" data based on the entire Power 5, and then will add in conference adjustment ratings to get a final score for each team, identifying who got the biggest bump from transfers along the way. At the end, I'll highlight the Group of 5 teams to identify who might make a playoff push, or at least a New Year's Six run. I use the team composite rating from 247 Sports, which aggregates the recruiting stars and ratings currently on a team's roster, as well as recruiting data on incoming freshmen and the transfer portal, all readily available on the 247 websites. Returning production is calculated from play-by-play data from the NCAA's website.

LINK

---

Guess who is #1 in the Returning Talent Index?

quote:

---

LSU, Oregon, and Miami are officially the teams to watch this fall.

---

quote:

---

Since 1996, every team that has won an undisputed national title except for Oklahoma in 2000 has had at least two top ten national recruiting classes in the four years before a title. So while signing a top ten recruiting class doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to win a national title — indeed, there are plenty of teams that don’t — for 24 of the past 25 years, you can’t win a title without at least two top ten recruiting classes.

---

Only 13 teams fit this category this season. One of whom is LSU (3 straight top 5 classes)

There was reason to be bullish on LSU entering 2019. They were returning a ton of production and the (odd year) schedule was favorable outside of a trip to Texas and Alabama. Well, the same factors are in play this season. No, there likely isn't a "Burrow" at QB. And the DC is unproven as opposed to Aranda entering 2019. But there a LOT of reason to like LSU this season.

Blind optimism made people believe LSU would be great last season even though the statistical data going into the season suggested otherwise (though no one thought they would be THAT bad). But if the data was mostly right in predicting last season, perhaps the same is true for this season.

Clemson blowing OU out will be the first time the playoffs that a team has been beaten by a team thats already kicked their arse in the playoffs.

O(verated)U is setting records.

Have the 2022 bowl projections come out yet?
I might be going to the Music City.

quote:

---

At some point OU will stop getting the benefit of the doubt, right?

---

And Notre Dame

I want LSU in the Playoffs. I get $3,600 if we win it all