The start of the 2025 college football season is still several months away, but with the spring practice season just around the corner, it is time to start looking ahead at what the upcoming campaign might bring.
For the Florida Gators, the future looks bright for the first time this decade after Billy Napier and Co. navigated one of the hardest schedules in recent memory to an 8-5 finish, including the program’s first bowl win since 2019. With the offense headed by a potential Heisman Trophy candidate — quarterback DJ Lagway — somehow sneaking into the College Football Playoff does not seem like a pipe dream anymore.
One of the more respected metrics for comparing teams in the sport is ESPN’s SP+ rankings put together by Bill Connelly. SP+ projections are based on three primary factors, weighted by their predictiveness: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history.
He released the initial data produced by his computer model on Thursday for all 136 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, including UF.
ESPN’s initial college football SP+ rankings for Florida, SEC
The Gators come in at No. 17 overall in the SP+ rankings with a 14.4 rating, wedged between the No. 16 South Carolina Gamecocks (15.4) and No. 18 SMU Mustangs (14.1). Florida’s offensive SP+ rating comes in at 33.6, which ranks 23rd in the nation, while the defense is at 19.2 (22nd) and the special teams among the top 10 at 0.3 (8th).
The Orange and Blue are one of a dozen Southeastern Confernece schools among the top 25, with the Alabama Crimson Tide coming in at No. 2 (26.1), followed by the Georgia Bulldogs (24.5) at No. 4, Texas Longhorns (21.9) at No. 7, Tennesee Volunteers (21.3) at No. 8, Ole Miss Rebels (20.2) at No. 9 and LSU Tigers (19.5) at No. 10 to wrap up the top 10.
The rest of the SEC schools include the 12th-ranked Texas A&M Aggies (18.5), 15th-ranked Missouri Tigers (15.7), 16th-ranked South Carolina Gamecocks (15.4), 20th-ranked Oklahoma Sooners (13.1) and 23rd-ranked Auburn Tigers (12.1) to round out the top 25.
About ESPN’s SP+ projections
“A reminder on SP+: It’s a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency,” Connelly notes. “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.”
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