‘They didn’t take no for an answer’: Inside the return of EA Sports College Football
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Michael Rothstein, ESPN Staff Writer
ORLANDO, Fla. — Daryl Holt shopped at a Books-A-Million near Auburn, Alabama, around Thanksgiving in 2019 when his clothes caught the attention of the person standing behind the counter. The EA Sports logo Holt wore led to the question he always received when wearing his company’s gear publicly.
When is the college football video game coming back?
Holt smiled. It had always been a desire to bring back the college football video game, but at that moment Holt knew something no one else outside the EA Sports offices in Central Florida did. When he returned from his trip, he had another conversation ready to potentially solve concerns and bring back one of the most resonant titles in the company’s catalog.
“I think I even said, ‘I don’t know, but maybe sooner than you think,'” Holt said. “And it kind of gave me that little extra push that I know that there were people that wanted this game to come back as much as I did, more so than I did.”
Holt, now the senior vice president and group general manager of EA Sports, understood the concerns and questions his bosses might have when he pitched the potential return of EA Sports College Football in December 2019. He was ready for all of them when he stepped into a half-hour meeting with EA Sports president Cam Weber’s offices at the company’s former facility in Maitland, Florida.
Holt reframed how the company looked at the college football game — one which EA Sports stopped making in 2013 in part due to a lawsuit from former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon surrounding name, image and likeness rights. NIL was still an unknown. So were logistics of reviving a franchise dormant for, at that point, more than six years. At one point during the meeting — Holt wouldn’t say how other than it was a creative solution the company ended up not needing — Holt knew he had done it. Unofficially, EA was going to bring back college football.
It would be over a year, in February 2021, before EA Sports publicly announced the eventual return of the game. By then, EA Sports started assembling — and in some cases reuniting — the development staff. It took another three years to bring the game to market this upcoming July 19.
What happened between? Building a game from scratch, inventing technologies, reining in overambition and creating a foundational game for a returned year-to-year franchise. They collected assets from all 134 schools, packing in as much as they could. They navigated having — and paying — actual college football players in the game thanks to current NIL rules. They added components of NIL in the game along with the transfer portal.
If they needed a reminder of their mission, they didn’t need to look far. On the wall of the college football development cluster at the EA Sports offices is a long banner with former Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson and the EA Sports NCAA Football 14 cover. It’s the last time the game was produced. They walk by it every day.
It led to a motivational mantra which kept focus and the need for authenticity in their aims.
“Every school is somebody’s favorite school,” Holt said. “Became kind of a rallying cry for us as a dev team.”
TICKET STUBS LINE the back of Ben Haumiller’s office on the third floor of EA Sports’ Orlando headquarters. There’s Florida State gear everywhere, too. Years ago, Haumiller was a college student at Florida State. He played in EA Sports’ competition to find the best college football video game player in America.
He lost in the tournament in 1999, but it led to a job as a quality verification tester with the company and eventually as a designer and producer on the old version of NCAA Football. The game went away after the O’Bannon lawsuit, and Haumiller transferred to different areas of the company. Like many of his colleagues, Haumiller hoped for College Football’s return.
EA Sports licensed a small number of schools as part of a college storyline in single-player mode for Madden ’18 and Madden ’20. Haumiller said putting college teams into the company’s popular NFL franchise was a way to get universities comfortable with EA Sports again.
Then Holt made his pitch. The game was greenlit and hiring began.
“The opportunity came to come back on the development side,” Haumiller said. “So I made that jump and came back to help get us on solid footing and where we go on this rebirth.”
It was the game Haumiller, now the principal game designer for College Football, always wanted to work on.
Rob Jones, the senior production director of College Football, was Holt’s first hire. A devout Michigan fan with memorabilia all over his office, Jones returned to EA in 2020 from 2K Sports, where he worked as a producer on the NBA 2K series for most of the 2000s and 2010s and helped launch the company’s College Hoops series as the game’s first producer. Together, he and Holt started building the college football team.
Holt said it was the easiest team he’s built in his time at EA Sports because there were existing employees across the company and new hires who wanted to bring back college football. There was reverence for the game inside and outside the building. The dedication and passion were clear to Holt early on. Every conversation of the game became a debate of what might work best.
The passion for colleges is clear throughout the college football cubicles, where almost all have some marker of college football fandom.
With the team largely built, they needed to figure out how to make a game centered around authenticity. That meant everything: stadiums, rosters, mascots and crowds.
The team created a pageantry database, which became a rolling list of traditions and idiosyncrasies for all 134 FBS programs. They asked schools for help, added what they knew from their own college football fandoms and even scoured fan forums to find things they may have missed — or to learn that a school no longer did tradition X or hand signal Y.
Production director Christian McLeod said every school had to have something. Not every tradition or chant or hand signal ended up in this year’s game, but they wanted something for everyone.
“We want to make sure that, again, everybody’s team is somebody’s favorite,” McLeod said. “Texas and Texas State need to feel the same when you’re playing as them if you’re a fan of that school.”
Building this took time. In all, EA Sports received tens of thousands of assets from schools in addition to their own work. They asked for and compiled touchdown celebrations for each team and stadium, how players celebrate after turnovers, how teams run out of tunnels, crowd hand signals, chants on key downs and details for stadiums, mascots, cheerleaders and uniforms.
Once received and researched, they had to figure out how to build them.
THERE WERE SOME helpful things for the team at the start. Some stadiums — including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for the SEC championship and USC’s home field, the Los Angeles Coliseum, from when the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams played games there — could be taken from Madden and repainted for whatever uses necessary.
But the majority of the almost 150 stadiums in the game had to be built from scratch. Even though the Frostbite engine is the same as Madden, what the college football team needed to do was much different — one of the many reasons EA Sports insists it won’t look or feel the same as the Madden series.
At one point, developers went to Holt and said they weren’t sure if they could get every stadium done in an authentic manner. It was a lot of space and capability. Both Holt and the development team knew the answer — 50 wasn’t going to cut it. They needed all 134.
As the team started construction, they began to look at innovative ways to solve problems and tech they could borrow from other EA games or create themselves. McLeod said they realized they needed a new lighting system in the game to create the scale they needed — Global Illumination Based on Surfels, or what they commonly call GIBS. GIBS is a dynamic, real-time lighting system that helps create different atmospheres in the stadium for a noon game, a 3:30 game or a night game, including how light might refract off helmets.
With GIBS in place, the team created a Stadium Toolkit, which McLeod said allowed designers and developers to almost go brick by brick, section by section to recreate stadiums to make sure the color schemes were correct down to the individual railings, tunnels and walls. It almost, McLeod said, became like a virtual Lego set putting it all together.
While there were some pieces from NCAA Football 14 they could use, those stadiums and mascots were built on a different engine for a different console. Not much would translate, so they had to start from the beginning.
Building an empty stadium took about a week depending on the venue, with Syracuse’s JMA Wireless Dome among the trickiest because it was indoors and cavernous, so lighting had to be set up a bit differently than other schools. McLeod called it “the perfect storm of stadiums.”
Understanding the crowd’s importance to college football, McLeod said he knew they had to “make sure that crowd looks amazing.” Are the bands in the right place? The visitor sections? The patterns some schools have within their crowds — think Tennessee’s Checkerboard and Penn State’s White Out games. The design team entered the empty virtual stadium and tagged where everything would be, a process taking multiple weeks.
There were some concessions needed to make sure the game still performed well, which is where the JMA Wireless Dome and its unique architecture helped. As the team tested everything from equipment pieces to plays, they put it in the Dome to check for performance and make sure the frame rates didn’t slow down.
There were small things in stadiums which held import, too. For McLeod, a diehard Michigan State fan, it came from Arkansas State, where there is a waterfall in the stadium and when the Red Wolves score a touchdown, fountains go off.
“That was one of those things that was a stretch goal for us to get in,” McLeod said. “And to see it actually manifest itself in the product. I’m so proud of the team to see that.”
MASCOTS — NOT ALL will make this year’s game — were another struggle point. One of the hardest things for the development team to create were four-legged friends like Texas’ Bevo (a longhorn steer) or Colorado’s Ralphie (a buffalo).
They had to develop new animation rigs different from those for players, coaches or fans because of four legs versus two.
McLeod said they created four different rigs for dogs, one for cows and one for Ralphie. Bevo was one of the first the team built because it proved they could do it.
Ralphie took the longest, about a month from start to finish, McLeod said.
“It’s the actual animation,” McLeod said. “It’s to make sure that Ralphie runs fluidly. We call them quadrupeds, right? A human on two legs has a totally different mocap rig or animation rig than an animal on four.”
Then there’s leg spans and strides and weight within the movement. McLeod said they knew that when they started. Like the stadiums, McLeod said shipping a game without Ralphie and Bevo “was not acceptable to us.”
While part of the team built out stadiums and mascots, another focused on game play with the same intent as everyone else — College Football would not look or play like Madden.
So playbooks matter. Game speed matters. Jones said they had to push the boundaries of what was possible. They had to have 134 specific playbooks, received help from their access to Pro Football Focus and had conversations with those within the game to help understand what styles teams run.
There were base plays and concepts they could use, but the key was playbook individuality. They wanted players to feel like they were playing as Tennessee or Michigan.
THE MOST SURPRISING thing came not from something they created or a hurdle they faced, but rather from what happened after they announced the name, image and likeness plan for athletes. Any athlete opting into the game who ends up being used in one of the 85 roster spots per team will receive a free copy of EA Sports College Football along with $600 with the option of remaining in the game yearly as long as the player has eligibility. There are also separate NIL deals made with athletes who could serve as ambassadors or cover athletes like Michigan’s Donovan Edwards, Colorado’s Travis Hunter and Texas’ Quinn Ewers.
I attended the cover shoot for EA Sports NCAA Football 25 at the Cotton Bowl in March. Here are @TravisHunterJr, @QuinnEwers and @DEdwards__ in the stadium tunnel during the shoot. pic.twitter.com/dlRGlTV9vP
— Adam Rittenberg (@ESPNRittenberg) May 16, 2024
EA Sports thought they’d get 7,000 or 8,000 players the first week. Eight days in, 10,000 players had agreed to be in the game. At present, more than 13,000 players have opted in.
“We were pleasantly surprised,” Jones said. “By the enthusiasm with which people were coming in.”
Not all of them will end up making it into the game due to the 85-person roster limit, but it’s still a large undertaking.
EA staffers created a system they call “Generic Plus,” developed by the art department. It takes about two to three hours to construct a player’s face in the game. EA does this by taking a reference photo of a player — think a passport photo or team headshot — and machine learning then creates an image of what the player looks like.
EA staffers then go in and make tweaks on what the machine missed or didn’t accurately portray, from hair to eyebrows to eyes, which could take 10 to 15 minutes. McLeod said if animators had to do the entire process, it might take a day per player, which was not an option.
“It was just a brand new way,” McLeod said.
Holt said the player raters for Madden have assisted with the ratings for college football players, but declined to go into specific detail.
When a player is in the game, there will be multiple uniform options. Each team will have at least a home and away jersey and, if an alternate jersey exists, at least one alternate. Some schools will have more than that and McLeod said after launch, they could end up adding more jersey options. Like everything else, uniform specifications came from a combination of school information and the research of EA’s staff.
WHILE THE GAME was being created on-site, EA Sports had to get announcer tracks recorded, featuring multiple broadcast teams including one led by ESPN’S Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit. Fowler said on Instagram he taped more than 115 hours of commentary over a two-year process.
Some of the sessions were done separately. Some were done together with the broadcast crews. Almost all had someone from EA on Zoom helping the process. Fowler said on Instagram he did calls of everything from touchdowns for every team — which took an hour to go through every team in the game — to a team punting on second down.
Jones said there was a baseline of calls they needed from both crews and a list of situations they needed. Both sets of commentary teams had to cover the entire game.
“It was a lot of writing scripts, but then eventually what starts happening is in order to get the best performance out of them, you have to let ’em ad-lib,” Jones said. “You kind of need to let them know what the situation is so that you can actually get the right amount of back-and-forth between them.”
As they maneuvered through the two-year process, the commentary became more comfortable and what you’d typically see from the crews during real games. The toughest thing, Jones said, was working around the broadcaster’s commitments.
In all, there are hundreds of hours of sound in the game. Different sounds will be triggered by events, Jones said, put in place by one of his team’s software engineers, Rick Mancuso, to make it all flow seamlessly. Mancuso was also in charge of adding the small sounds for schools in the game, like a “Let’s Go Blue” chant at Michigan.
THERE IS CLEAR excitement throughout the EA Sports College Football team. You hear it in the way they talk about the game and how they all stress the same thing: Authenticity is the foundation.
This isn’t a one-off. What they build for this year they’ll be able to add to and tweak in iterations to come.
They know they couldn’t get everything they wanted in this version. A combination of time and capacity wouldn’t allow it. There’s already a list — some from the pageantry database, some from ideas they couldn’t quite reach — of what they’d like to add in next year’s game.
They also recognize this: Four years after Holt went into Weber’s office and three years after announcing the game, college football is back. And here to stay.
“I would definitely put it, in terms of my 20 years with EA Sports, as one of those big achievement moments,” Holt said. “In terms of saying how do we not let scale or let a problem deter, derail or stop us.
“That’s the key for this team is they didn’t take no for an answer.”
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Greg Wyshynski
The Winnipeg Jets defended star goaltender Connor Hellebuyck after another disastrous performance on the road, a 5-2 loss Friday night in which the St. Louis Blues forced Game 7 in their Stanley Cup Playoff opening-round series.
Hellebuyck was pulled after the second period in favor of backup Eric Comrie, the third straight game in St. Louis that he failed to finish. Hellebuyck surrendered five goals on 23 shots, including four goals on eight shots during a 5-minute, 23-second stretch in the second period that cost the Jets the game.
As has become tradition in this series, Blues fans mockingly chanted, “We want Connor!” after Hellebuyck left the game and the Jets’ bench.
“This isn’t about Connor,” Winnipeg coach Scott Arniel said. “Tonight was not about Connor. Tonight, we imploded in front of him. Now, it’s a one-game showdown. It’s our goalie against their goalie, our best players against their best, our grinders against theirs. I have a lot of confidence in our [entire] group — not just Helly.”
Hellebuyck won the Vezina Trophy last season as the NHL’s top goaltender, as voted on by the league’s general managers. He also won the award in 2019-20 and is the favorite to win it for a third time this season. Hellebuyck is also a finalist for the 2024-25 Hart Trophy, awarded to the NHL’s most valuable player. He was the starting goaltender for Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in February and was expected to do the same for the U.S. in next year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.
But his recent performances in the Stanley Cup playoffs have been the antithesis of that success.
Over the past three postseasons, two of which the Jets lost in the first round in just five games, Hellebuyck is 5-11 with an .860 save percentage.
Hellebuyck failed to finish any of the three games played in St. Louis during the series. He was pulled with 9:28 left in regulation in Game 3, having given up six goals on 25 shots. In Game 4, Hellebuyck was pulled 2:01 into the third period after surrendering five goals on 18 shots. Hellebuyck has allowed four or more goals in seven straight road playoff games, tying the second-longest streak in Stanley Cup playoff history
At home against the Blues in this series, it has been a different story, if not necessarily a great one: Hellebuyck is 3-0 in Winnipeg, with an .879 save percentage and a 2.33 goals-against average.
His home numbers in the regular season: 27-3-3 with a .938 save percentage and a 1.63 goals-against average in 33 games. His road numbers: 20-9-0 with a .911 save percentage and a 2.43 goals-against average. Hellebuyck was not pulled in his 63 appearances in the regular season.
Even with Hellebuyck’s multiple seasons of playoff struggles, his team exonerated him from blame for the Game 6 loss.
“I don’t need to talk about Bucky,” said forward Nikolaj Ehlers, who returned to the lineup for the first time since April 12 after a foot injury. “He’s been unbelievable for us all year. He’s continued to do that. We’ve got to be better.”
Said forward Cole Perfetti, who had a goal in Game 6: “Things got carried away. We lost our game for four or five minutes. They got a couple pucks through, and they found the back of the net. It’s frustrating. Happened a couple of times now this series where we fell asleep and they jumped on us.”
Perfetti said the Jets have rebounded from losses like this — one reason their confidence isn’t shaken ahead of Sunday’s Game 7.
“We had a loss like that in Game 4 [in St. Louis],” he said. “We went home and got the job done in Game 5. We’ve got the home ice. We’ve got the fans behind us and our barn rocking.”
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Bill Connelly
Almost no word in the English language makes a college football fan more defensive than the L-word: luck.
We weren’t lucky to have a great turnover margin — our coaches are just really good at emphasizing ball security! We’re tougher than everyone else — that’s why we recovered all those fumbles!
We weren’t lucky to win all those close games — we’re clutch! Our coaches know how to press all the right buttons! Our quarterback is a cool customer!
We weren’t lucky to have fewer injuries than everyone else — our strength-and-conditioning coach is the best in America! And again: We’re just tougher!
As loath as we may be to admit it, a large percentage of a given college football season — with its small overall sample of games — is determined by the bounce of a pointy ball, the bend of a ligament and the whims of fate. Certain teams will end up with an unsustainably good turnover margin that turns on them the next year. Certain teams (often the same ones) will enjoy a great run of close-game fortune based on some combination of great coaching, sturdy quarterback play, timely special teams contributions … and massive amounts of unsustainable randomness. Certain teams will keep their starting lineups mostly intact for 12 or more games while another is watching its depth chart change dramatically on a week-to-week basis.
As we prepare for the 2025 college football season, it’s worth stepping back and looking at who did, and didn’t, get the bounces in 2024. Just because Lady Luck was (or wasn’t) on your side one year, doesn’t automatically mean your fortunes will flip the next, but that’s often how these things go. Be it turnovers, close-game fortune or injuries, let’s talk about the teams that were dealt the best and worst hands last fall.
Jump to a section:
Turnover luck | Close games luck
Injuries and general shuffling | Turnaround candidates
Turnover luck
In last year’s ACC championship game, Clemson bolted to a 24-7 halftime lead, then white-knuckled it to the finish. SMU came back to tie the score at 31 with only 16 seconds left, but Nolan Hauser‘s 56-yard field goal at the buzzer gave the Tigers a 34-31 victory and a spot in 2024’s College Football Playoff at Alabama’s expense.
In the first series of the game, Clemson’s T.J. Parker pulled a perfect sack-and-strip of SMU QB Kevin Jennings, forcing and falling on a loose ball at the SMU 33-yard line. Clemson scored two plays later to take a 7-0 lead. Late in the first quarter, Khalil Barnes picked off a Jennings pass near midfield, ending what could have become a scoring threat with one more first down. A few minutes later, Clemson’s Cade Klubnik fumbled at the end of a 14-yard gain, but tight end Jake Briningstool recovered it at midfield, preventing another potential scoring threat from developing. (Klubnik fumbled seven times in the 2024 season but lost only one of them.)
Early in the third quarter, after SMU cut Clemson’s lead to 24-14, David Eziomume fumbled the ensuing kickoff at the Clemson 6, but teammate Keith Adams Jr. recovered it right before two SMU players pounced.
Over 60 minutes, both teams fumbled twice, and Clemson defended (intercepted or broke up) eight passes to SMU’s seven. On average, 50% of fumbles are lost and about 21% of passes defended become INTs, so Clemson’s expected turnover margin in this game was plus-0.2 (because of the extra pass defended). The Tigers’ actual turnover margin was plus-2, a difference of 1.8 turnovers in a game they barely won.
Clemson was obviously a solid team in 2024, but the Tigers probably wouldn’t have reached the CFP without turnovers luck. For the season, they fumbled 16 times but lost only three, and comparing their expected (based on the averages above) and actual turnover margins, almost no one benefited more from the randomness of a bouncing ball.
It probably isn’t a surprise to see that, of last year’s 12 playoff teams, eight benefited from positive turnovers luck, and six were at plus-3.3 or higher. You’ve got to be lucky and good to win, right?
You aren’t often lucky for two straight years, though. It might be noteworthy to point out that, of the teams in Mark Schlabach’s Way-Too-Early 2025 rankings, five were in the top 20 in terms of turnovers luck: No. 5 Georgia, No. 7 Clemson, No. 9 BYU, No. 11 Iowa State and No. 17 Indiana (plus two others from his Teams Also Considered list: Army and Baylor).
It’s also noteworthy to point out that three teams on Schlabach’s list — No. 6 Oregon, No. 8 LSU and No. 15 SMU — ranked in the triple-digits in terms of turnovers luck. Oregon started the season 13-0 without the benefit of bounces. For that matter, Auburn, a team on the Also Considered list, ranked 125th in turnovers luck in a season that saw the Tigers go just 1-3 in one-score finishes. There might not have been a more what-could-have-been team in the country than Hugh Freeze’s Tigers.
Close games
One of my favorite tools in my statistical toolbox is what I call postgame win expectancy. The idea is to take all of a game’s key, predictive stats — all the things that end up feeding into my SP+ rankings — and basically toss them into the air and say, “With these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time.”
Alabama‘s 40-35 loss to Vanderbilt on Oct. 5 was one of the most impactful results of the CFP race. It was also one of the least likely results of the season in terms of postgame win expectancy. Bama averaged 8.8 yards per play to Vandy’s 5.6, generated a 56% success rate* to Vandy’s 43% and scored touchdowns on all four of its trips into the red zone. It’s really hard to lose when you do all of that — in fact, the Crimson Tide’s postgame win expectancy was a whopping 98.5%. (You can see all postgame win expectancy data here)
(* Success rate: how frequently an offense is gaining at least 50% of necessary yardage on first down, 70% on second and 100% on third and fourth. It is one of the more reliable and predictive stats you’ll find, and it’s a big part of SP+.)
Vandy managed to overcome these stats in part because of two of the most perfect bounces you’ll ever see. In the first, Jalen Milroe had a pass batted at the line, and it deflected high into the air and, eventually, into the arms of Randon Fontenette, who caught it on the run and raced 29 yards for a touchdown and an early 13-0 lead.
In the second half, with Bama driving to potentially take the lead, Miles Capers sacked Milroe and forced a fumble; the ball sat on the ground for what felt like an eternity before Yilanan Ouattara outwrestled a Bama lineman for it. Instead of trailing, Vandy took over near midfield and scored seven plays later. It took turnovers luck and unlikely key-play execution — despite a 43% success rate, Diego Pavia and the Commodores went 12-for-18 on third down and 1-for-1 on fourth — for Vandy to turn a 1.5% postgame win expectancy into a victory. It also wasn’t Alabama’s only incredibly unlikely loss: The Tide were at 87.8% to beat Michigan in the ReliaQuest Bowl but fell 19-13.
(Ole Miss can feel the Tide’s pain: The Rebels were at 76.0% postgame win expectancy against Kentucky and 73.7% against Florida. There was only a 6% chance that they would lose both games, and even going 1-1 would have likely landed them a CFP bid. They lost both.)
Adding up each game’s postgame win expectancy is a nice way of seeing how many games a team should have won on average. I call this a team’s second-order win total. Alabama was at 10.7 second-order wins but went 9-4. That was one of the biggest differences of the season. Somehow, however, Iron Bowl rival Auburn was even more unfortunate.
Based solely on stats, Arkansas State should have won about four games, and Auburn should have won about eight. Instead, the Red Wolves went 8-5 and the Tigers went 5-7.
Comparing win totals to these second-order wins is one of the surest ways of identifying potential turnaround stories for the following season. In 2023, 15 teams had second-order win totals at least one game higher than their actual win totals — meaning they suffered from poor close-game fortune. Ten of those 15 teams saw their win totals increase by at least two games in 2024, including East Carolina (from 2-10 to 8-5), TCU (5-7 to 9-4), Pitt (3-9 to 7-6), Boise State (8-6 to 12-2) and Louisiana (6-7 to 10-4). On average, these 15 teams improved by 1.9 wins.
On the flip side, 19 teams overachieved their second-order win totals by at least 1.0 wins in 2023. This list includes both of 2023’s national title game participants, Washington and Michigan. The Huskies and Wolverines sank from a combined 29-1 in 2023 to 14-12 in 2024, and it could have been even worse. Michigan overachieved again, going 8-5 despite a second-order win total of 6.0. Other 2023 overachievers weren’t so lucky. Oklahoma State (from 10-4 to 3-9), Wyoming (from 9-4 to 3-9), Northwestern (from 8-5 to 4-8) and NC State (from 9-4 to 6-7) all won more games than the stats expected in 2023, and all of them crumpled to some degree in 2024. On average, the 19 overachieving teams regressed by 1.9 wins last fall.
It’s worth keeping in mind that several teams in Schlabach’s Way-Too-Early Top 25 — including No. 6 Oregon, No. 8 LSU, No. 11 Iowa State, No. 13 Illinois and, yes, No. 21 Michigan — all exceeded statistical expectations in wins last season, as did Also Considered teams like Army, Duke, Missouri and Texas Tech. The fact that Oregon and LSU overachieved while suffering from poor turnovers luck is (admittedly) rather unlikely and paints a conflicting picture.
Meanwhile, one should note that three Way-Too-Early teams — No. 12 Alabama, No. 23 Miami and No. 25 Ole Miss (plus Washington and, of course, Auburn from the Also Considered list) — all lost more games than expected last season. With just a little bit of good fortune, they could prove to be awfully underrated.
Injuries and general shuffling
Injuries are hard to define in college football — coaches are frequently canny in the information they do and do not provide, and with so many teams in FBS, it’s impossible to derive accurate data regarding how many games were missed due to injury.
We can glean quite a bit from starting lineups, however. Teams with lineups that barely changed throughout the season were probably pretty happy with their overall results, while teams with ever-changing lineups likely succumbed to lots of losses. Below, I’ve ranked teams using a simple ratio: I compared (a) the number of players who either started every game or started all but one for a given team to (b) the number of players who started only one or two games, likely as a stopgap. If you had far more of the former, your team likely avoided major injury issues and, with a couple of major exceptions, thrived. If you had more of the latter, the negative effects were probably pretty obvious.
Despite the presence of 1-11 Purdue and 2-10 Kennesaw State near the top of the list — Purdue fielded one of the worst power conference teams in recent memory and barely could blame injury for its issues — you can still see a decent correlation between a positive ratio and positive results. The six teams with a ratio of at least 2.8 or above went a combined 62-22 in 2024, while the teams with a 0.5 ratio or worse went 31-56.
Seven of nine conference champions had a ratio of at least 1.3, and 11 of the 12 CFP teams were at 1.44 or higher (five were at 2.6 or higher). Indiana, the most shocking of CFP teams, was second on the list above; epic disappointments like Oklahoma and, especially, Florida State were near the bottom. (The fact that Georgia won the SEC and reached the CFP despite a pretty terrible injury ratio speaks volumes about the depth Kirby Smart has built in Athens. Of course, the Dawgs also enjoyed solid turnovers luck.)
Major turnaround candidates
It’s fair to use this information as a reason for skepticism about teams like Indiana (turnovers luck and injuries luck), Clemson (turnovers luck), Iowa State (close-games luck), Penn State (injuries luck) or Sam Houston (all of the above, plus a coaching change), but let’s end on an optimistic note instead. Here are five teams that could pretty easily enjoy a big turnaround if Lady Luck is a little kinder.
Auburn Tigers: Auburn enjoyed a better success rate than its opponents (44.7% to 38.5%) and made more big plays as well (8.9% of plays gained 20-plus yards versus 5.7% for opponents). That makes it awfully hard to lose! But the Tigers made exactly the mistake they couldn’t make and managed to lose games with 94%, 76% and 61% postgame win expectancy. There’s nothing saying this was all bad luck, but even with a modest turnaround in fortune, the Tigers will have a very high ceiling in 2025.
Florida Gators: The Gators improved from 41st to 20th in SP+ and from 5-7 to 8-5 overall despite starting three quarterbacks and 12 different DBs and ranking 132nd on the list above. That says pretty spectacular things about their overall upside, especially considering their improved experience levels on the O-line, in the secondary and the general optimism about sophomore quarterback DJ Lagway.
Florida Atlantic Owls: Only one team ranked 111th or worse in all three of the tables above — turnovers luck (111th), second-order win difference (121st) and injury ratio (131st). You could use this information to make the case that the Owls shouldn’t have fired head coach Tom Herman, or you could simply say that new head coach Zach Kittley is pretty well-positioned to get some bounces and hit the ground running.
Florida State Seminoles: There was evidently plenty of poor fortune to go around in the Sunshine State last season, and while Mike Norvell’s Seminoles suffered an epic hangover on the field, they also didn’t get a single bounce: They were 129th in turnovers luck, 99th in second-order win difference and 110th in injury ratio. Norvell has brought in new coordinators and plenty of new players, and the Noles are almost guaranteed to jump up from 2-10. With a little luck, that jump could be a pretty big one.
Utah Utes: Along with UCF, Utah was one of only two teams to start four different quarterbacks in 2024. The Utes were also among only four teams to start at least 11 different receivers or tight ends and among five teams to start at least nine defensive linemen. If you’re looking for an easy explanation for how they fell from 65th to 96th in offensive SP+ and from 8-5 to 5-7 overall, that’s pretty succinct and telling.
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