Ian's annual dunk on the ESPN FPI rankings

ESPN released their first FPI rankings for the 2024 College Football season. I don't think that much of them.

Last year I took the opportunity to turn ESPN’s FPI rankings release into easy content for myself and I see no reason not to make this a regular feature.

ESPN gets links to their work and I have something to talk about in the offseason that will likely interest y’all as well. None of us can help ourselves, why even try to fight it?

When I saw they’d released new rankings I double checked last year’s results to see if they were as over confident and silly as I thought they were at the time. The trick of offseason predictions is that most people forget all about them when the season starts. For analysts to be forgiven their bad guesses feels fair to me, especially as I am one of them.

But when these analytic formulas with proprietary calculations come out and tell us percentages of likelihood for different events? It’s a load of nonsense and it’s the sort of nonsense I’ve grown to hate with increasing fervor now that people will sometimes propose and justify policy decisions over things that truly matter based on what percentages spit out from a proprietary model that pretends to know what all the important variables are. The machines don’t know what the most important variables are and you don’t know what you don’t know.

Photo by Nice M Nshuti on Unsplash

I also grew to develop an extra intense dislike of these models after criticizing an FPI playoff projection during a season one year and laughing at the fact that it was actually impossible for the teams it had said were the four most likely to make it in. I was bombarded with condescending retorts from ESPN writers who seemed to have been marshaled to defend their corporation’s product.

They were wrong, of course. Somehow it escaped notice that for all four teams to build a playoff resume would require destroying each others’ cases.

Anyways, let’s dive in to how FPI did a year ago and see what they produced this year.