130-team rankings over the last 5 years show the Pac-12 cratered

On Monday, Feb. 11, I will post this year’s initial S&P+ projections for the 2019 season. The 2019 college football preview series will begin on the same day.

The rankings will once again be a mix of three factors: returning production, recent history, and recent recruiting. I tinkered with a new way of approaching recruiting rankings, one more related to two-deeps, but that will likely be a part of the late-summer projection updates. It wasn’t an option for use just yet.

Basically, to figure out who’s going to be good next year, the S&P+ formula asks three questions: Who’s been good? Who’s returning their good players? And how good is the talent coming in?

As a lead-up to the projections, we’re looking at each individual factor and what it has to tell us.

• Last week, we looked at returning production, which said exciting things about teams like LSU, Florida, and Florida State and pushed back on the Texas hype machine.
• After National Signing Day, we’ll look at shifts in recruiting.
• In this post, let’s look at recent performance.

Here’s each team’s updated five-year S&P+ history.

This isn’t the same version that goes into the projections — for that version, there is extra weight given to more recent seasons — but it sets the table.

I’m also including some trend information. You can look at last year’s five-year history figure to see whose prospects are rising and falling.

One note: I periodically update the S&P+ algorithm and have recently done so. You can read more about the changes I’ve made here. I am in the process of walking through each season and the shifts these changes caused, but in the meantime you can look at all the updated rankings at Football Outsiders. The five-year averages below come from the updated numbers.

Another note: for the two most recent FBS additions — third-year Coastal Carolina and second-year Liberty — I am including their averages to date, but not trend information, for obvious reasons. I treated UAB as if the Blazers were not on hiatus for two seasons, though their five-year average doesn’t include 2015 or 2016.

A slight slip turns into a stumble in Tallahassee

In this year’s team previews, I’ll be including a chart that looks at teams’ week-to-week ratings (again, using the new S&P+ formula) over the past five years. With Florida State suffering this cycle’s largest overall slide in five-year averages, let’s see if we can spot where the Noles’ slippage began:

Okay, that was pretty easy. The Noles dipped a bit in 2017, after quarterback Deondre Francois got injured, but great defense and my increased emphasis on priors in S&P+ kept them at least in the top 20. And then last year happened.

Since moving the five-year range forward one year means basically looking at the difference between each team’s 2013 S&P+ rating (now out of the range) and its 2018 rating, FSU replaced a dominant national title run with what was, per S&P+, its worst performance since 1976. That will certainly change your baseline moving forward.

Here are the 11 Power 5 teams that saw their averages fall the most:

(Why 11 and not 10? You’ll see.)

1. Florida State (down 7.4)
2. Louisville (down 6.7)
3. Oregon State (down 5.6)
4. Kansas State (down 4.4)
5. Oregon (down 4.3)
6. UCLA (down 4.1)
7. Baylor (down 3.7)
8. North Carolina (down 3.2)
9. USC (down 2.6)
10. Arizona State (down 2.5)
11. Arizona (down 2.2)

My goodness, I just listed three ACC teams ... and half the dang Pac-12. And if I expanded this list to 14 teams, I would rope in two more ACC teams (Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech) and a seventh from out west (Stanford).

It’s not news that the Pac-12 has been struggling. It’s had a team in the College Football Playoff just once in four seasons, but that’s happenstance — this proves that the issues run deeper than simply not having a 12-1 or 13-0 conference champion. Only three Pac-12 teams (Cal, Utah, and Washington State) improved their averages on this list, and only Cal did so by more than just one point. Colorado stayed the same, Washington slipped ever so slightly, and the other eight teams all regressed. That is, to put it lightly, disconcerting.

Congratulations, by the way, to Oregon State for reaching the top three of this list two years in a row. (The Beavers were No. 1 last year.) That’s a pretty stiff slide there.

Here are your top 10 improving power conference teams:

The Power 5 risers haven’t risen at the same rate that the fallers have fallen — only one of the top 13 risers hails from a power conference — but some are still changing their lot in life.

1. Purdue (up 4.4)
2. Kentucky (up 3.1)
3. West Virginia (up 2.8)
4. Florida (up 2.8)
5. Virginia (up 2.5)
6. Cal (up 2.5)
7. Mississippi State (up 2.5)
8. Iowa State (up 2.4)
9. Michigan (up 2.2)
10. NC State (up 2.0)

Three SEC teams, one from the Pac-12, and two each from the other three P5s. Purdue replaced a 1-11 campaign in 2013 (S&P+ ranking: 106th) with a second straight top-50 performance, which was enough to lead the way. Boiler up.

As always, this list reminds us that college football’s top tier is pretty defined.

Your last three national championship programs — Alabama (2015, 2017), Ohio State (2014), and Clemson (2016, 2018) — lead, followed by a team that’s made three of the last four CFPs (Oklahoma) and a team that made the national title game just 13 months ago (Georgia).

Still, there are below-the-surface shifts in college football’s balance of power, especially in the ACC and Pac-12.