Projecting Louisville's 2025 Season Using Updated SP+ Rankings

It may still seem like an eternity away, but college football is closer to kickoff than you think. With Memorial Day just around the corner, we are now 99 days from football's triumphant return.

Year two of the Jeff Brohm era didn't wind up with an appearance in the ACC Championship Game like year one did, but the Cardinals still went 9-4 overall and 5-3 in ACC play. This included a win over Washington in the Sun Bowl, and snapping lengthy losing streaks to both Clemson and Kentucky.

Add in Louisville's momentum both in the winter and spring transfer portal windows, plus out on the high school recruiting trail, how well will they perform in year three of the Jeff Brohm era? Well, we already have some idea thanks to the predictive college football metric SP+, which had their rankings updated on Thursday.

SP+, according to its creator Bill Connelly of ESPN, is a "tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency". He has made several tweaks to it over the years since creating it in 2008 while at Football Outsiders, but the current iteration takes into account three primary factors: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history.

Surprisingly, Louisville's SP+ rating decreased a little, falling to 12.1 from their February offseason mark of 12.4. As a result, their overall ranking amongst the now 136 FBS teams fell from No. 22 to No. 24.

Given their success on that side of the line of scrimmage last season, the metric is very high on the offensive side of the ball for the Cardinals. Louisville sports an offensive SP+ rating of 36.7, which ranks 12th in the FBS. While it's the same rating from back in February, their ranking here actually fell one spot from 11th.

Conversely, SP+ is not as big of a fan of the defensive side of things. Louisville has a defensive SP+ rating of 24.5, which is only slightly down from their 24.4 rating in February. In this part of the metric, the Cardinals actually stood pat at No. 45.

Using SP+, we can plug in the rating from each team on Louisville's schedule and take a deep dive into how the 2024 season might transpire. We can figure out the win percentage in each game (accounting for home vs. away), the expected wins mark at the end of the season, as well as the statistical likelihood of every outcome during and concluding the season.