What to know ahead of this week’s House v. NCAA settlement votes
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Dan Murphy
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Dan Murphy
ESPN Staff Writer
- Covers the Big Ten
- Joined ESPN.com in 2014
- Graduate of the University of Notre Dame
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Pete Thamel
The trajectory of major college sports is set to bend this week to give athletes a significantly larger portion of the billions of dollars they help generate for their schools.
The industry’s top leaders will gather in the next few days to vote on the proposed terms of a landmark settlement. The deal would create a new framework for schools to share millions of dollars with their athletes in the future and create a fund of more than $2.7 billion to pay former athletes for past damages.
The settlement would also mark the end of at least three major federal antitrust lawsuits looming as existential threats to the NCAA and its schools, and would resolve the most pressing — and arguably most formidable — legal challenges facing the college sports industry. The deal would not, however, solve all of the NCAA’s problems or even provide clear answers to many crucial questions about how a more professionalized version of major college sports might look in the near future.
Here are some of the details and unsolved questions shaping conversations during what could be a monumental week in the history of college sports.
Terms of the settlement
While several important details are not yet finalized, sources have confirmed the following general structure of an agreement to settle the House v. NCAA case:
The NCAA’s national office would foot the bill for a $2.7 billion payment for past damages over the course of the next 10 years. The NCAA would generate the majority of that money partly by cutting back on the funds that it distributes to Division I schools on an annual basis.
The power conferences would agree to a forward-looking revenue sharing structure that would give schools the ability to spend a maximum of roughly $20 million per year on direct payments to athletes. The $20 million figure could grow larger every few years if school revenue grows. Each school would be left to decide how to allocate that money while remaining compliant with Title IX laws.
The plaintiffs, which could include all current Division I athletes, would give up their right to file future antitrust claims against the NCAA’s rules. This would include dropping two pending antitrust cases (Hubbard v. NCAA and Carter v. NCAA) that also have been filed by plaintiff attorneys Steve Berman and Jeffrey Kessler.
The sides would also agree to renew the class on an annual basis to include new athletes. New athletes — mostly incoming freshmen — would have to declare that they are opting out of the class in order to challenge the NCAA’s restrictions on payments in the future.
This rolling new class of athletes would, in effect, retire the most impactful tool that has been used over the past decade to chip away at the NCAA’s amateurism rules. Previously, Berman and Kessler needed only one athlete to lend his or her name to a case that would aim to remove illegal restrictions for all college athletes. Moving forward, a lawyer pushing to provide more benefits for athletes will first have to organize and gain commitments from a large group of players who opted out of the settlement.
Athletic and university administrators have long argued that their athletes are generally happy with what the schools provide and that the last decade’s lawsuits are the product of agitating lawyers and advocates. A settlement would not close the door on bargaining with athletes in the future, but it would make it less appealing for attorneys to test the legality of the NCAA’s rules without an explicit demand from a large swath of athletes.
While individual athletes could still opt out and sue the NCAA, the damages for a single athlete or small group of athletes would be far smaller. So, in practice, the House case settlement would provide schools with protection from future suits by removing the financial incentives that make these cases — which often takes years to fight — worthwhile for a plaintiffs’ attorney.
Class action cases have been an important tool to date for plaintiff attorneys because organizing college athletes — a busy and transient group of young people — is extremely difficult. (Although there are a number of groups actively attempting to form college players’ associations.) Some sports antitrust experts, such as Baruch College law professor Marc Edelman, say that, by making future class action lawsuits more difficult, this settlement would give schools ample license to collude on restricting payment to players. Edelman said this conflict could give a judge pause when deciding to approve the terms of the settlement.
Who’s in?
Attorneys representing the plaintiff class of all Division I athletes proposed terms to all defendants involved in the lawsuit in late April. To settle the case fully, the NCAA and each of the five power conferences will have to agree to the terms. Leaders from each group are expected to hold votes by Thursday.
The NCAA’s Board of Governors is scheduled to meet Wednesday.
The Big Ten presidents are planning to meet in person and vote this week as part of the league’s regularly scheduled meetings. That league has long been considered the major conference with the least amount of pushback on the vote. ACC presidents, SEC leaders and Big 12 leaders will also vote this week. In an odd twist, the Pac-12’s membership from this past season will gather virtually to vote, as the 10 departing programs will not vote in the conferences they plan to join next year. Since the Pac-12 was part of the suit as a 12-team league, the 12 presidents and chancellors of those schools will vote as a 12-school unit.
While the NCAA and conferences have to opt in, any athletes involved in the class will have an opportunity to opt out once the attorneys hammer out the details of settlement terms. Any athletes who opt out would retain the right to sue the NCAA in the future, but they would miss out on their cut of the $2.7 billion in damages. On the flip side, it’s unlikely that a current athlete who opts out would give up the opportunity to receive the forward-looking revenue share money, according to legal sources.
Next steps
If all parties agree to the broader terms of a settlement of the House case this week, their attorneys will get to work drafting the fine print of an agreement. That process can take weeks, according to attorneys with experience settling complex antitrust cases.
The judge overseeing the case, Judge Claudia Wilken of California’s Northern District, would then hold a preliminary hearing to review the terms of the settlement. If the judge approves, notice would be sent to all athletes providing them with a chance to formally object or opt out. And finally, the agreement would go back to the courthouse where Wilken would consider any arguments presented in objection before deciding whether the settlement meets her approval.
The Fontenot Case
Alex Fontenot is a former Colorado football player who sued the NCAA in late November for restricting athletes from sharing in television rights revenue. He filed his case a few weeks before Berman and Kessler (the two attorneys representing athletes in the current settlement negotiations) filed a similar complaint called Carter v. NCAA.
Both Kessler and the NCAA have argued that the two complaints are similar and should be consolidated into a single case, which would likely lead to the Fontenot case being part of the pending settlement talks. Fontenot’s attorneys do not want to consolidate and will present their argument for why the cases should be separate in a Colorado courtroom this Thursday.
Garrett Broshuis, Fontenot’s attorney, said he has concerns about how the House settlement could make it harder for future athletes to fight for more rights. Broshuis, a former pitcher at Missouri, has spent most of the last decade successfully suing Major League Baseball to help minor leaguers negotiate better working conditions.
The judge in the Fontenot case has not yet made a ruling on whether it should qualify as a class action lawsuit. If the House settlement is finalized, any college athlete would have to opt out of the settlement in order to take part in the Fontenot case. Opt-outs or objections raised during the House settlement hearings could give Judge Wilken additional pause in approving its terms.
Would Fontenot and other athletes who are working with his attorneys on this case opt out of the House settlement in hopes of pursuing a better deal in their own case?
“To the extent we can, we’re monitoring the media reports surrounding the proposed settlement,” Broshuis told ESPN this weekend. “Once the actual terms are available, we’ll closely scrutinize them. We do have concerns about what’s being reported so far, especially when it comes to the ability for future generations of athletes to continue to fight for their rights.”
Scholarship and roster limits
In the sprint to settle, there’s a bevy of details that are going to be left to college sports leaders to work out in coming months.
The inclusion of roster caps could impact college sports on the field. Right now, college sports operate with scholarship limits. For example, Division I football is limited to 85 scholarships, baseball to 11.7, and softball to 12. Meanwhile, Division I football rosters run to nearly 140 players on the high end, while baseball rosters top out around 40 players, and softball averages about 25 players.
Leaders in college sports are considering uniform roster caps instead of scholarship limits, which could be viewed as another collusive restraint on spending. This would give schools the choice to give out 20 baseball scholarships, for example, if they wished.
If rosters are capped at a certain number, the ripple effect could be more scholarships and smaller roster sizes. The viability of walk-ons, especially for rosters with dozens of them, could be at risk.
Sources caution that this won’t be determined for months, as formalizing roster caps are not part of the settlement. Sources have told ESPN that football coaches in particular will be vocal about radical changes, as walk-ons are part of the fabric of the sport. Stetson Bennett (Georgia), Baker Mayfield (Oklahoma) and Hunter Renfrow (Clemson) are all recent examples of transformative walk-ons.
The future of collectives
Multiple sources have told ESPN that some school leaders are hopeful the future revenue sharing model will eliminate or significantly decrease the role that NIL collectives play in the marketplace for athletes.
While an additional $20 million flowing directly from schools to athletes could theoretically satisfy the competitive market for talent and decrease the interest of major donors from contributing to collectives, experts say there is no clear legal mechanism that could be included in a settlement that would eliminate collectives. Those groups — which are independent from schools even if they often operate in a hand-in-glove fashion — could continue to use NIL opportunities to give their schools an edge in recruiting by adding money on top of the revenue share that an athlete might get from his or her school.
For the schools with the deepest pockets or most competitive donors, a $20 million estimated revenue share would be in reality more of a floor than a ceiling for athlete compensation. Most well-established collectives are planning to continue operating outside of their school’s control, according to Russell White, the president of TCA, a trade association of more than 30 different collectives associated with power conference schools.
“It just makes $20 million the new baseline,” White told ESPN. “Their hope is that this tamps down donor fatigue and boosters feel like they won’t have to contribute [to collectives]. But these groups like to win. There’s no chance this will turn off those competitive juices.”
How would the damages money be distributed?
Any athlete who played a Division I sport from 2016 through present day has a claim to some of the roughly $2.7 billion in settlement money. The plaintiffs’ attorneys will also receive a significant portion of the money. The damages represent money athletes might have made through NIL deals if the NCAA’s rules had not restricted them in the past.
It’s not clear if the plaintiffs will disburse the money equally among the whole class or assign different values based on an athlete’s probable earning power during his or her career. Some class action settlements hire specialists to determine each class member’s relative value and how much of the overall payment they should receive. That could be a painfully detailed process in this case, which includes tens of thousands of athletes in the class.
The NCAA also plans to pay that money over the course of the next 10 years, according to sources. It’s not clear if every athlete in the class would get an annual check for the next decade or if each athlete would be paid in one lump sum with some of them waiting years longer than others to receive their cut.
Are there any roadblocks to settlement expected?
In short, the NCAA’s schools and conferences will likely move forward with the agreement this week despite unhappiness in how the NCAA will withhold the revenue from schools to pay the $2.7 billion over the next decade.
There is significant pushback among leagues outside the power leagues on the proposed payment structure. According to a memo the NCAA sent to all 32 Division I conferences this week, the NCAA will use more than $1 billion from reserves, catastrophic insurance, new revenue and budget cuts to help pay the damages, sources told ESPN this week. The memo also states that an additional $1.6 billion would come from reductions in NCAA distributions, 60 percent of which would come from the 27 Division I conferences outside of the so-called power five football leagues. The other 40 percent would come from cuts the power conferences, which are the named defendants with the NCAA in the case.
The basketball-centric Big East is slated to sacrifice between $5.4 million and $6.6 million annually over the next decade, and the similarly basketball-centric West Coast Conference between $3.5 million and $4.3 million annually, according to a source familiar with the memo. The smallest leagues would lose out on just under $2 million annually, which is nearly 20% of what they receive annually from the NCAA.
(The NCAA would withhold money from six funds across Division I leagues — the basketball performance fund via the NCAA tournament, grants-in-aid, the academic enhancement fund, sports sponsorships, conference grants and the academic performance fund.)
In an e-mail obtained by ESPN from Big East commissioner Val Ackerman to her athletic directors and presidents on Saturday morning, she said the Big East has “strong objections” to the damages framework. She wrote that she’s relayed those to NCAA president Charlie Baker.
The 22 conferences that don’t have FBS football — known as the CCA22 — have also been engaged in conversations about their disappointment with the damages proposal, according to sources.
Per a source, some members of the CCA22 are planning on sending a letter to the NCAA requesting the responsibility be flipped — the power conferences contributing to 60 percent of the damages and the other 27 leagues contributing 40 percent. In her message, Ackerman wrote she expects former FBS football players will be “the primary beneficiaries of the NIL ‘back pay’ amounts” — suggesting that the damages may not be shared equally among athletes.
Ackerman’s letter does mention the widely held belief in the industry that it may be tough for any significant change: “At this stage, it is unclear how much time or leverage we will have to alter the plan the NCAA and [power conferences] have orchestrated.”
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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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