ESPN’s advanced metric football power index, or FPI, is giving some love to this year’s Michigan State team.
The Spartans check in at #14 in FPI’s preseason ranking. It’s the highest MSU has been ranked in any major preseason poll. Michigan State checked in at #20 in the Amway Coaches Poll, ESPN’s college football analysts ranked the Spartans #24 in their preseason poll and the NCAA ranked MSU #22 in their preseason poll.
The preseason AP poll comes out on Monday, August 19th and I’d bet Michigan State slots in somewhere in the 20’s there.
So the ESPN FPI ranking is a solid step above the rest of the rankings.
It’s important to note that FPI is a predictive analytic that measures many different variables and runs 10,000 season simulations to come up with its final ranking. That means that things like schedule, travel, historical trends from the last four seasons and many others are taken into account in addition to the adjusted efficiencies of the team’s offense, defense and special teams.
More simply put, FPI might not think MSU is the 14th best team. It’s more accurate to say FPI thinks MSU is most statistically likely to be the 14th most successful team. Of course there are countless outcomes for this season that all fall within the wide spectrum between winless to undefeated.
Still, it’s nice to see the math like Michigan State a little more than the public and college football experts.
