'He might not be getting the credit he deserves for that' - ESPN gives Vols' Josh Heupel the respect he deserves in coach rankings

College football head coach rankings are impossible to escape this time of year. 

And while those rankings can at times be fun, they're also incredibly subjective, which means there's never going to be a consensus ranking that everyone agrees with. 

ESPN's Bill Connelly, however, did his best to put together an objective set of head coach rankings this week by using his SP+ projections/ratings. 

From ESPN: I've begun to incorporate teams' performance against long-term averages into my preseason SP+ projections, and it seems we could use a very similar concept to evaluate coach performances. For each year someone is a head coach, we could compare his team's SP+ rating for that season to the school's average from the 20 previous years. (If the school is newer to FBS and doesn't have a 20-year average, we can use whatever average exists to date. And for a program's first FBS season, we can simply compare the team's SP+ rating to the overall average for first-year programs.)

As a result, Connelly's rankings look far different than many of the lists you've likely seen floating around on the internet over the last couple of months. Specifically, Connelly's rankings have Tennessee Vols head coach Josh Heupel ranked far higher than I've seen him ranked by any other outlet. 

Here's Connelly's top five via his SP+ method: 
1. Ryan Day - Ohio State
2. Josh Heupel - Tennessee 
3. Kirby Smart - Georgia 
4. James Franklin - Penn State
5. Dabo Swinney - Clemson

Seeing Heupel listed above Smart is probably a shock even for Vols fans. 

Here's what Connelly had to say about Heupel being ranked so high. 

From ESPN: Maybe the name that jumps out the most above is Josh Heupel. I think anyone would consider him a very good coach (he's 37-15 overall), but he doesn't exactly draw any "best in the game?" hype. He benefited from a positive situation at UCF, where he inherited a rising program from Scott Frost in 2019 and produced big ratings in his first couple of years on the job. But his average rating at Tennessee has been a solid 14.0 as well; the Volunteers had been up and down for years, but he has produced four top-20 SP+ ratings in a row and two top-10s in the past three years. He might not be getting the credit he deserves for that.

I'm of the opinion that most coaches in college football are pretty close to each other in terms of abilities. Situations matter. And not every situation is the same (or even comparable). 

Connelly's rankings essentially reward Heupel for thriving in a situation that's been a career-killer for previous head coaches. 

Smart took over a good situation at Georgia and made it better. Heupel, however, took over a situation that almost no one in college football wanted to touch and instantly turned it around. I don't think that necessarily makes Heupel a "better" coach than Smart (again, situations aren't comparable), but I think it's pretty clear that he hasn't been getting the credit he deserves from most folks in the national media.