CU, Purdue, UCLA, Wisconsin: The games that could decide the Huskers' 2024
The first SP+ rankings of the season are out, and with that we can start inferring some win probabilities game-by-game for the Huskers
I don’t remember when the “Way Too Early” college football rankings started showing up. It was, to the best of my recollection, within the past decade. An astute editor somwhere had the idea, “You know, nothing sells like the future, so why not do our first rankings for next season even if it seems crazy?” That editor was right because I know the rankings are not “Way Too Early” now because every major outlet seems to do one the day after the national championship game is over. What once seemed brash now just seems normal. Way too early is right on time.
The implied self-doubt in these headlines always rubbed me the wrong way. Either you believe it’s too early for these rankings, in which case you should care about your readers enough to not do them, or you know people will read it when the new season is one day old and that’s too powerful an incentive to ignore. Just do the thing you’re going to do anyway, don’t pretend it’s something else.
I have no reservations about starting to project next season the day last season is over. I turn the page very quickly and look forward, perhaps unhealthily, to the slow trickle of new information throughout the offseason. It’s why I jumped on the national title odds, returning-production rankings and season win totals when they were released, and it’s why I anxiously await the release of the first power rankings of the new season.
While there’s intrigue in a “Way Too Early” top 25—I read most of them, and if a sportswriter is good and pays close attention to college football, they’ll be decently accurate—there are no real stakes involved. If that first top 25 only has seven teams in the real, year-end top 25, almost everyone has forgotten about it by then. But that’s not the case with anything odds-based or from a statistical model. Those projections can be measured, and, more importantly, the consequences are real if they’re consistently off. If a sportswriter is wrong, telling them, “You’re an idiot for having Michigan as the fifth-best team in the country,” has no real impact. They get stuff wrong and, even when they don’t, are told they’re idiots all the time. But there are consequences if a model gets them wrong. You don’t get to make bad odds or have an inaccurate model for long because the market punishes you.
All of which is to say, the first SP+ ratings for 2024 arrived on Valentine’s Day and it was the best box of chocolates I could receive. You can do things with these ratings that, while just a projection like an opinion-based top 25 or an opinion-aware set of odds, help level-set for the season ahead. The Huskers checked in at 39th nationally in those rankings, 10th in the Big Ten.
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