ESPN’s updated FPI is down on the Bears

Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesESPN just updated their Football Power Index (FPI) to predict the strength of teams in 2019. A team’s FPI score is a prediction of their margin of victory over the “average” team; a negative FPI means that team would lose to the “average” team by that many points.

I collected the Cal-relevant information in the following table; Cal-relevant includes the Pac-12 and our 2019 out-of-conference opponents. (Scores in the magnitude of ±300 function as effective “N/A”, but putting text like that in the table would mess up the sort function. So Ole Miss’s Pac-12 rank is 300 because they aren’t in the conference and Colorado’s opponent rank is 300 because we…