The lengthy 2024 season has been over for more than a month, the transfer portal has settled down for now, and we’re waiting to find out if the sport’s powers-that-be are going to change the format of the College Football Playoff for 2025 and beyond.

It seems like as good a time as any to start talking about who might actually be good in 2025!

Early each offseason, I spit out initial SP+ projections, based on a forever-changing combination of returning production, recruiting and recent history. As always, those projections stem from three primary questions: How good has your team been recently? How well has it recruited? And who returns from last year’s roster?

SP+ projections are still a few days away, but let’s deal with that last question first. Who returns a majority of last year’s production? Who has done the best job of importing production from another team? Who is starting from scratch?

For a few years now, I’ve been attempting to expand how we measure returning production. The formula I created shifts with each new year of data and has had to shift a ton with the rising number of transfers. But the gist remains the same: High or low returning production percentages correlate well with improvement or regression. They might not guarantee a good or bad team, but they can tell us a lot. And in 2025, they tell us a lot about the state of college football.

Looking through the prism of returning production data of every FBS team, we’ll break down how the percentage of returning players is trending, what the numbers mean for your favorite team and which teams can expect to improve and which could regress in 2025.

Jump to a section:
Percentages | Transfers
Returning trends | What numbers mean
Likely to improve | Likely to regress

New York Mets left-hander Sean Manaea has been shut down for a few weeks due to a right oblique strain and will likely start the season on the injured list, manager Carlos Mendoza told reporters Monday.

Manaea, who is projected as the team’s No. 2 starter, went 12-6 with a 3.47 ERA with 184 strikeouts with the Mets in 2024, leading to a three-year, $75 million deal in December.

“The good news is … the tendon is not involved, the rib cage is not involved,” Mendoza said of the MRI results for Manaea. “It’s just straight muscle, so he’s going to be shut down for a couple of weeks — and then we’ll reassess after that. We’ve got to build him back up again. Safe to say that he’s probably going to start the season on the IL. … Once he’s symptom-free, he’ll start his throwing.”

It is the second injury to the Mets’ starting rotation after right-hander Frankie Montas was shut down for six to eight weeks on Feb. 17 after suffering a high-grade lat strain.

Kodai Senga, Clay Holmes and David Peterson are set to top the Mets’ starting rotation to begin the season. Paul Blackburn, Griffin Canning and Tylor Megill will compete for the final two spots until Manaea and Montas return.

The Mets have also lost reserve infielder Nick Madrigal for an extended period after he suffered a fractured left shoulder during Sunday’s spring training game against the Washington Nationals.

Madrigal, who is fighting for a roster spot, fell to the ground while throwing to first base after making a bare-handed play on a ground ball. He was originally diagnosed with a dislocated shoulder but further tests revealed the fracture in his non-throwing shoulder.

Mendoza told reporters that Madrigal, who signed a one-year deal with the Mets in January, will have a CT scan and will be sidelined “for a long time.”

Field Level Media contributed to this report.

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Mid-February live batting practice sessions are usually forgettable, but the one held on the main field at Clover Park the day after Valentine’s Day was different for the New York Mets.

Kodai Senga, the presumed ace a year ago, faced four hitters. He threw 16 pitches, touched 96 mph and didn’t appear compromised from the shoulder injury that kept him out for all but 5⅓ innings during the 2024 regular season. Afterward, he shared laughs with catcher Luis Torrens and pitching coach Jeremy Hefner.

“I saw a smile on his face,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “That’s a good sign.”

Last spring, Senga, coming off an outstanding rookie year, was supposed to be a sure thing. Instead, he was shut down with a shoulder injury before appearing in a Grapefruit League game and started just the one game in July.

The Mets thrived without him, even with a rotation full of newcomers and uncertainty, completing an 89-win campaign capped by a trip to the National League Championship Series. But as they look to improve on that finish after a monster offseason, questions around the rotation remain.

Can Senga stay healthy? When will Frankie Montas, shut down for up to eight weeks with a lat strain, return? Will Clay Holmes, exclusively a reliever the past six seasons, successfully transition back to starting games? Will Sean Manaea continue where he left off last season after a midseason delivery change produced elite results? Was David Peterson’s career year — he posted a 2.90 ERA in 21 starts — an aberration?

“I will say, I feel much better about our starting pitching depth sitting here today than I did a year ago,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns said days before Montas sustained his injury during his first bullpen session of camp. “We made that a priority of our offseason. We brought in a number of players at all levels of free agency.”

All levels but one: proven ace-level starting pitchers.

The Mets’ offseason will be remembered for bookend investments in All-Stars to fortify their lineup: Juan Soto in early December and Pete Alonso the week before pitchers and catchers reported for camp. For the second offseason under Stearns’ direction, though, they had holes to fill in the rotation and did not acquire any of the premium starters available.

A year after their long-term bid for Yoshinobu Yamamoto fell short, the Mets did not aggressively pursue the three top starters available in free agency: Max Fried, Blake Snell and Corbin Burnes. (Fried strengthened an already-strong rotation strength across town, signing with the New York Yankees on an eight-year, $218 million deal.)

Instead, they made low-risk, high-reward short-term investments with an emphasis on depth. They re-signed Manaea to a three-year, $75 million contract. They signed Holmes, a two-time All-Star closer, to a three-year, $38 million deal to become a starter. They added Montas, an injury-plagued right-hander who recorded a 4.84 ERA in 2024, on a two-year, $34 million deal. They signed Griffin Canning, a former top prospect, to a one-year, $4.25 million deal after the right-hander pitched to a 5.19 ERA and surrendered 31 home runs last season, the second-most in baseball, for the last-place Los Angeles Angels.

The additions join Senga, Peterson, Paul Blackburn and Tylor Megill to round out the options for a six-man rotation, which the Mets plan to deploy in large part to accommodate Senga.

“I think our pitching is going to surprise people, even though there’s a lot of talk about starting pitching,” Mets owner Steve Cohen said. “And another thing is we’re flexible. If we have to make changes or improve the team during the year, you saw what we did in ’24 and we’ll do it again in ’25.”

For all the offensive fireworks and Grimace-engineered vibes the 2024 OMG Mets produced, extracting value from the starting rotation was the foundation for their success. Luis Severino, signed to a one-year, $13 million deal, recorded a 3.91 ERA over 31 starts last year after posting a 6.65 ERA with the Yankees the year before. Jose Quintana registered a 3.75 ERA in 31 starts in his age-35 season on a $13 million salary. Manaea dropped his arm slot in his 21st start and pitched to a 3.09 ERA over his final 12 outings before the playoffs.

“[We] want to be a team that can improve players,” Cohen said. “And I think from a pitching perspective, we’re able to do that.”

Hefner pointed to Severino’s jump from 89⅓ innings in 2023 to 182 innings last season as evidence that, with the required work ethic, a successful sizable workload increase is possible.

“I feel like our performance staff does a good job of monitoring guys and not just putting reins on them,” Hefner said. “They’re very much like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s push. How far can we take them?’ As long as they’re recovering and they’re honest with us and they’re staying on top of their programs, we have full confidence that a guy could make a big jump in innings.”

In Holmes, the Mets will attempt a more extreme escalation.

The Yankees’ former closer has totaled 337⅓ innings over his seven-year career, including 63 innings each of the past two seasons. He hasn’t started a game since September 2018. To get through a lineup two or three times, Holmes said he plans on incorporating a changeup — a pitch he started tinkering with in bullpens last season — for the first time and using his four-seam fastball more often to complement his sinker (his best pitch). The goal is to build up to 90 pitches by Opening Day.

“I would say now it’s starting to get a little different,” Holmes said last week. “I threw three innings the other day. It was probably the first time I’ve done that in a while.”

Relievers have successfully made the jump to starter. Hall of Famer John Smoltz famously converted from starter to closer back to starter. For the Mets, a club with World Series aspirations, it’s a risk they decided is worth taking.

Of course, that risk won’t matter if they can’t keep their starting pitchers healthy — and that starts with Senga, who, alongside Manaea, will top a rotation the Mets hope will help lead them back to October.

“He just needs to be healthy,” Mendoza said. “As long as he’s taking the ball. But we got some good options. And we talked to him about that. He doesn’t have to be the hero, feeling like he’s the ace of the staff, because we got some options. And we like those guys at the front end of the rotation.”