The book closed on the Missouri men’s basketball season with a disappointing thud. What could have been a deep tournament run instead ended swiftly and painfully, bringing an early start to the fully football-focused portion of my offseason.
We got our first taste of off-season brain candy recently, when ESPN’s Bill Connelly — the founder of this very website — dropped his first batch of 2025 season projections. Connelly invented SP+, an all-encompassing predictive team metric that has gone mainstream, much like DVOA for NFL teams or KenPom ratings in college hoops.
Three key factors go into SP+ projections (which will be updated twice more before toe meets leather):
—the past three years of results, to influence stability,
—recruiting and transfer rankings, to evaluate overall talent level,
—-and most importantly, returning production, to determine proven college football contributions.