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Penn State cracks top 3 in post-spring SP+ top 25 as season countdown starts; where did the Lions land?

Greg Pickelby: Greg Pickel05/22/25GregPickel
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Cornerback AJ Harris. (Credit: Ryan Snyder | Blue White Illustrated)

Penn State football hit the top five of another post-spring top 25 on Thursday. However, unlike some of the media rankings that have the Lions anywhere from No. 1 to No. 5, this one is data-driven. ESPN’s Bill Connelly released his post-spring SP+ rankings to celebrate the 100-day countdown to many teams’ first games of the season (others are just 93 days away from kickoff). Head coach James Franklin’s team checks in at No. 3 with a SP+ ranking of 27.7. Ohio State, which the Lions meet on Nov. 1 in Columbus, is first with 29.5 points. Alabama is second with 27.9. Georgia (26.9) and Texas (26.4) round out the top five.

Penn State also has the Big Ten’s highest odds of having a 10-2 season or better. Connelly gives them an 82 percent chance to accomplish that against what he calls the nation’s No. 29 schedule.

“With a particularly weak nonconference schedule — and a particularly good team, Penn State might be in the driver’s seat in terms of playoff qualification, while Ohio State, Oregon, Alabama, Michigan and Georgia are all over 60% likely to finish the regular season with two or fewer losses,” he writes.

Besides Ohio State, other 2025 Penn State opponents who made the SP+ top 25 include Oregon at No. 7 with 24.7 points, and Indiana at No. 23 (12.2). Iowa, then, sits just outside of that cutoff at No. 28 with 11.4 points.

More: The 100 day countdown to the 2025 Penn State football season starts now

Connelly uses a combination of returning production, recent recruiting results, and recruit history to create his SP+ rankings. As something of a disclaimer, he writes:

“SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking, and along those lines, these projections aren’t intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather to date.”

Penn State opens the 2025 season against Nevada on Aug. 30 at Beaver Stadium. The Wolfpack are No. 124 in the post-spring SP+ rankings, which is part of the reason why DraftKings already made the Lions a 43.5-point favorite over the Mountain West school. A kick time for that contest should come out next week.

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