Primer on Predictive Statistics in College Football

You can’t have an offseason in college football without passionately arguing with strangers about how good your team will be before they’ve even played a down. Oftentimes these conversations involve hyping up a pre-season SP+ rating or arguing why the FPI is clearly missing your team’s hidden potential.

If you’ve ever found yourself in one of these conversations and wondered why you were talking to nerds in the first place what the differences were between FEI, SP+, and FPI, this post is for you! Let it serve as your primer to the common predictive measures that keyboard analysts like to toss around.

Each of the following ratings are intended to predict a team’s overall performance in future…