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Despite being just one season removed from winning a national championship, most pundits in college football have started to look at Michigan football as something of an also-ran following an 8-5 season in 2024, rather than last year being a blip on the radar.
The operative word here is ‘most.’
ESPN’s resident advanced analytics guru Bill Connelly isn’t among those looking down his nose at the Wolverines. Of course, Connelly is the one who puts together SP+ as well as the returning production rankings. He’s done more to analyze the field than simply going off name recognition or projecting off of the previous year’s results.
As far as the maize and blue are concerned, Connelly does have Michigan as the fourth-best team in the Big Ten — but he also has the Wolverines as the 10th-best team in the country.
Via his Big Ten preview on ESPN, he has Michigan as one of the conference championship contenders:
2025 projection: 10th in SP+, 9.8 average wins (7.2 in the Big Ten)
If you can beat Ohio State and Alabama without a quarterback, just think of what you can do with one, right (…)
The No. 10 ranking in SP+ is certainly aggressive. It will require massive offensive improvement. But with a schedule featuring only two opponents projected better than 30th (Oklahoma at the start, Ohio State at the end), the Wolverines won’t need a top-10 team to win a lot of games.
One of the things he mentions is that Michigan will face some tough competition early on, with road trips to Oklahoma, Nebraska, and USC. He does have the Sooners at No. 16 in his rankings, so the only school that is ranked ahead of the Wolverines on the schedule is Ohio State.
So, with that in mind, should Michigan football return to form, where the Wolverines beat the teams they’re supposed to, that — in theory — would vault the maize and blue to 11-0 going into…
Source link : https://wolverineswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/wolverines/football/2025/07/18/michigan-football-2025-espn-sp-plus-ranking-big-ten-preview/85284202007/
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Publish date : 2025-07-18 23:15:00
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