No, your contact lenses aren’t giving out. The SP+ metric’s projected record for Notre Dame in 2021 really is what you read.
7-5.
That’s what it said even after you cleaned your glasses or zoomed in on the text just to make sure you saw it correctly.
Seven and five.
It lands as gracefully as a cinderblock amid a soundtrack of disdainful laughter from Notre Dame fans across the country.
How could a team with four straight 10-plus win seasons and fresh off its second College Football Playoff appearance in three years drop that much and sit 25th in the preseason SP+ ranking? Especially when it just hired away one of the game’s most coveted up-and-coming coordinators to run its defense. And when early betting odds peg Notre Dame as a favorite in all but one game.
What gives? It’s worth exploring. SP+ is an oft-cited predictive metric devised by the bright mind of ESPN college football analytics guru Bill Connelly. It’s rooted in theoretically sound principles. The heaviest factors in preseason SP+ are returning production and last year’s final SP+ rankings. Recent recruiting and recent history are also in the equation.
The crux of SP+’s lower preseason expectations for Notre Dame rests in the first one. The Irish are 123rd out of 127 Football Bowl Subdivision teams in Connelly’s returning production rankings.
“In a year in which seemingly everyone returns their starting quarterback and 80% or more of last year's production,” Connelly wrote in his Notre Dame preview ($), “the Fighting Irish have to replace starting QB Ian Book and their top two WRs, four All-ACC offensive linemen (!!) and stars at defensive end, outside linebacker, cornerback and strong safety.”
On that, he’s correct, though just about every Irish fan knows Notre Dame loses impact players at important positions. Its nine NFL Draft picks this year were the program’s most since 1994. Meanwhile, 72 FBS teams return at least 75 percent of their production.
Returning production deserves more than a shoo-away hand wave. On the aggregate, it’s often predictive. Last year’s LSU team underscores why it matters. The 2019 national champion Tigers returned just 42 percent of their production and went 5-5 in 2020 despite their annual presence in the top 10 of the recruiting rankings.
On the other side, Texas A&M ranked 16th in returning production last offseason and improved from 8-5 to 9-1. No team returned more production from 2019 to 2020 than Northwestern, and the Wildcats jumped from 3-9 to 7-2 with a Big Ten West title.
But there are holes on the individual team level. When discussing good teams that lost a lot of production, there’s one hard-to-quantify element. Not all production losses and replacements are created equal. Replacing a first-team all-conference player with three underclassmen who have barely played is a different task than elevating a highly ranked recruit from complementary role to starter.
The former describes Notre Dame’s offensive line reboot well. The latter fits Notre Dame’s 2020 safety situation — both 2019 starters left, but that opened a spot for freshman star Kyle Hamilton.
Like Hamilton last year, high-upside rusher Isaiah Foskey ascends into a starting defensive end role this year after notching 4.5 sacks in about 23 snaps per game in 2020. There’s a chance he becomes a more impactful player with that workload than departed vyper defensive end Daelin Hayes was last season.
There’s a difference in having D.J. Uiagalelei (Clemson’s top-five recruit who started twice in 2020), Jack Coan (Notre Dame’s potential starter who made 18 career starts at Wisconsin) and Texas A&M’s collection of three underclassmen with 16 combined pass attempts as quarterbacks to replace draft picks. Uiagalelei already feels like a bankable asset. Coan feels like a safely projectable quality starter. Texas A&M has a wide range of outcomes.
(Per Connelly, Coan’s 2019 stats are included in Notre Dame’s returning production numbers).
When looking at Notre Dame’s 2021 successors to 2020 standouts, non-certainties are easy to spot. There won’t be an equal to Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah at rover. The boundary corner contenders played 91 snaps in 2020. Notre Dame will likely start at least one offensive tackle who had little or no college experience prior to this year as a replacement for three-year starters and Day 2 draft picks.
There are fair questions that make a playoff return difficult to foresee. SP+ understands many of those.
What SP+ can’t fully sense, though, is track record. The recent history portion of it can grasp Notre Dame’s six straight SP+ top-20 finishes, but a team’s success in production replacement and player development are not easily quantifiable.
Those areas are the backbone of Notre Dame’s recent stability and high-floor operation. The Irish may be the strongest individual case for returning production’s lack of major importance. They have ranked higher than 80th in returning production only once since the 2017 offseason. They still managed to win at least 10 games each season. That’s a credit to developmental ability, maximizing talent and recruiting around a top-10 level.
Asking a mathematical formula to account for a staff’s development skills, recruiting rankings on the whole and benefit of the doubt isn’t really possible. Even Connelly knows that and admitted in his preview that he would be surprised if Notre Dame actually finished 7-5.
“He loses star players and star assistants, and the train keeps rolling,” Connelly wrote of Kelly. “The Irish recruit at a top-10 or so level, and in terms of consistency of quality, Kelly runs a top-10 program.”
Even if all the starting lineup turnover is too large an obstacle in the way of a top-10 finish this year, the Irish’s current proficiency in navigating personnel losses ought to be enough to end closer to top-10 than the seven-win mark.
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