ESPN: KSU IS THE #5 TEAM IN AMERICA
Also ESPN: KSU is the #130 team in America. A way-too-early look at SP+ lines for this fall, plus a trillion-dollar parlay where the Owls can still win CUSA's regular season title in men's basketball.
First, the good news: ESPN’s Bill Connelly, the worldwide leader’s college football data guru, ranked the Owls in the top 5 nationally this week. No further context is required. Process that specific piece of info, exit this post, and live a happy life. You cheer for one of the best teams in America.
If you must dig deeper and ask for details, fine: It’s not exactly a preseason ranking. Jerry Mack’s first Kennesaw State squad enters spring practice among the nation’s leaders in returning production, including 69% (sigh, nice) on offense and 78% on defense. Connelly released the full list Monday, factoring true retention plus incoming transfers to varying degrees. Overall, a 73% returning production rate gives the Owls the fifth-best percentage in the entire country, and the defense ranks 3rd in the nation.
Now for the less-than-stellar news: Connelly’s returning production piece was just one stage of rolling out his first SP+ ranking in 2025…
…in which the Owls find themselves 130th overall and 12th in CUSA. That combines an offense in dead last and a defense at 98th, putting KSU 19.7 points worse than the average FBS team.
A bottom-tier SP+ rating is no surprise, given the formula’s other essential elements for projection at this stage of the offseason: Recent history and recruiting results. We’ve already talked through the recruiting class, a step in the right direction without enough on-paper pedigree to move the needle on the advanced numbers. For the recent results: After the dust settled on 2024, the Owls finished the season at 132, rated 25 points worse than the average FBS team.
We’re a long way from final preseason ratings, and even further from the season opener in Winston-Salem. Will that stop me from posting updated SP+ lines for the fall? Of course not. Adding the same 2.5-point home-field advantage that Connelly uses for his weekly projections, we can also get a way, way too early look at the current SP+ lines if the season started today:
Game 1: KSU (+17) at Wake Forest
Game 2: KSU (+34.2) at Indiana
Game 3: Merrimack College at KSU (TBA, no FCS #s yet)
Game 4: Arkansas State at KSU (+5.1)
Game 5: MTSU at KSU (-0.3)
Game 6: Louisiana Tech at KSU (+4.5)
Game 7: KSU (+7) at FIU
Game 8: UTEP at KSU (+0.6)
Game 9: KSU (+7.3) at New Mexico State
Game 10: KSU (+11.8) at Jacksonville State
Game 11: Missouri State at KSU (+0.6)
Game 12: KSU (+23.3) at Liberty
Looking at the very specific situation in Kennesaw—replacing the only HC in history, new coordinators for the third-straight season, following a rough intro to FBS —finding some semblance of continuity means even more for the Owls than it would for most FBS programs. That’s especially helpful on defense, where Marc Mattioli inherits 78% production from a unit that ranked 99th in EPA/play, nearly 30 spots better than the other side of the ball. Sure, those aren’t 2021 UGA defensive numbers, but they did keep a historically bad offense afloat in a number of games last season.
On the offensive side of the ball, the formula includes the following pieces of the pie: 40% from returning OL snaps, 35% from WR/TE yards, 22% QB from passing yards, and 3% from RB rushing yards. Connelly did factor the passing numbers of new WR Davis Bryson, though I think everyone involved would project better numbers at QB this season. SP+’s metrics on defensive production focus on returning snaps, tackles, and tackles for loss at a 33/35/32% split between DL, LBs and DBs in that order.
Per Connelly’s calculations, P5 schools will bring back 58.6% of production on average, compared to just 49% for their G5 counterparts. In a vacuum, it’s not necessarily a good thing for a G5 program to bring back so much production in the current college football ecosystem. If you’re not a selling club, to borrow a soccer term, that’s likely a lagging indicator about the current state of the program. Other FBS programs didn’t want to raid your roster, or the lost talent didn’t make much of a dent in the overall number for various reasons. The truth for the Owls is probably somewhere in the middle, with guys like Carson Kent and Jayven Williams moving to the SEC, and three members of the much-derided OL ending up in the AAC.
At the very least, I think you have to chalk this returning production number up as one of the first real wins of the Mack era. He arrived to campus shortly after the season ended, with a ton of guys in the portal, and a plenty of work toward building a staff and infrastructure. Some players left, some stuck around, and once SP+ factored in some plug-and-play additions in the transfer class, Kennesaw’s roster ended up in much healthier spot than many would’ve predicted in the aftermath of Bohannon’s firing. Elsewhere in CUSA, the other three head coaches to take jobs this cycle will lead rosters ranking outside the top 100 in returning production.
Not all production is good production, but this football program is in a moment where we’ll need to claim every win we can get, on spreadsheets or in real life. Even if it’s not a guarantee that the Owls actually do improve, Mack’s returning production did cross an important threshold where it’s been proven to make a serious impact over the past few seasons. Connelly explains:
If we lower the bar all the way to 70%, that ropes in six more teams for 2025: Illinois, Kennesaw State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Vanderbilt. Over the past three years, teams at 70% returning production or higher have improved 70% of the time, which says good things for five or six of the eight teams above. Those that improved did so by an average of 7.1 points.
Owls fans definitely won’t turn down that kind of boost in SP+, even if that would’ve only bumped KSU to 125th in the nation in the ‘24 rankings. A potential touchdown of improvement would go a long way in a wide-open CUSA, where only Liberty (59) and WKU (94) make the current top 100.
MBB: KSU at FIU - Thursday, 7 PM
Are we sure all the parity in CUSA basketball is actually a good thing? If everyone beats everyone else on a nightly basis, all those individual results start to lose meaning. As entertaining as the league has been game to game, it’s almost context-free basketball, where a tourney format that doesn’t do much to differentiate seeds 1 to 6 in a middle-class heavy conference. It feels like the regular season has all the stakes of a 2K game at times. I wonder how much this will all resonate for the eight teams that don’t cut down the nets or get the NIT bid.
VinesPom Connection, part of A Sea of Red’s basketball coverage, posted the current CUSA bracket earlier this week, giving an update on the road to Huntsville. (Good resource for Flames info, by the way.)
Would Pettway take this bracket if you offered a chance to cancel the final three games? 100%, I think. This would give his Owls a few days to gameplan for NMSU’s defense and avoid MTSU/Liberty until a potential championship game. Either way, 9 wins most likely keeps the Kennesaw safely inside the top 6 based on their competition’s remaining opponents. Avoiding the first round is basically all that matters in this coin-flip CUSA regular season.
Parity won’t be a factor this week, as the Owls travel to play the only two teams in CUSA to separate from the pack, for better or worse, based on efficiency margins. Kennesaw’s Thursday opponent, FIU, is in what might as well be the ASUN relegation zone, while Liberty watches from their usual spot in the corner ahead of Sunday’s CBS Sports Network spotlight.
KSU is squarely in that upper-middle class with MTSU, Jacksonville State, and NMSU — followed by WKU, UTEP, Sam Houston, and LA Tech in the tier below:
As we saw a month ago, the Panthers are an analytics marvel this season - among the nation’s worst in almost every offensive category except drawing fouls (uh-oh), and one of the most consistently annoying at the other end. A chaos defense in front of an empty gym in Miami isn’t the ideal recipe for a pseudo-must-win game, but the Owls should get the job done ahead of the trip to Lynchburg.
Believe it or not —there’s still a narrow route to Kennesaw winning CUSA’s regular season championship. We’re talking about a billion-to-one parlay if you could bet on all the required results. The path starts with the following results in Thursday night’s action, followed by a lot more needle-threading over the final three gamedays:
Kennesaw over FIU, obviously
Liberty over Jax State
NMSU over MTSU
Maybe the parity is good after all? Hat tip to notnothing.net for putting together the seeding/result calculations. You can create some outrageous closing stretches by tinkering with the game-by-game results and seeing how the final standings react.
The computers say…
KenPom: KSU 73, FIU 68
EvanMiya: KSU 73.5, FIU 71.1
T-Rank: KSU 73, FIU 69
BPI: Owls by 3