The longest offseason of any sport is at a standstill, but not a complete standstill. Bill Connelly, ESPN’s preeminent college football number cruncher, has been spending extra time on spreadsheets to create some much-needed content. The curator of SP+ has released one piece of the formula, returning production.
For years college football fans quantified returning production by counting returning starters. What if those starters did absolutely nothing the year before? The returning production figure is based purely on outputs from the prior year in the form of yards, touchdowns, tackles, turnovers etc. Some positions matter more than others in this equation.