This chart suggests not so much. Maybe.
Now, that being said, it’s important to remember that a bonus year of eligibility was granted because of the pandemic. Percentages across the board were accordingly higher than was the norm. You have to go all the way down to number 100 before you find a team that returned less than 70% of its production.
Add to that the impact of the transfer portal in the preseason and you’ve got yourself something of an outlier, I suspect. (For one thing, I would bet good money this was the first time we saw numbers 111 and 120 face off in a national title game.) I will be curious to see how this plays out in 2022.
Get The Picture 
I think it’s probably pretty common for the CFP teams to be really low in this metric because the elite teams are constantly churning out talent. Seems like Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, Oklahoma, Georgia will always be hard pressed to get much about 60% in this category in any given year.
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Georgia will actually be fairly high in 2022. Returning QB, returning TEs and receivers, even the backup RBs from last year got a lot of totes due to blowouts. The number would be lower had Pickens not been hurt this year. To a lesser degree that goes for Burton as well.
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Also, the WR returning production we were all so anxiously awaiting for last summer vaporized into the walking wounded before the first game. FR got us through the season which makes your point stick even more.
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Arguing numbers with Bill C is certainly one way to spend your time on Twitter.
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About like arguing point spreads with Ace Rothstein. And Bill C does talk about specific types of returning production, especially passing game, being way more important. Glancing at our stats we have the QB plus much of our receiving (3 of top 4, 6 of top 8 pending Big O’s decision) production coming back. No idea how to calculate Defensive production though. And agree with the point someone else made that the Bamas and UGAs of the world are never gonna top these lists, we’re not on one of those cycles where we hit a senior-laden team every 3 years or so. Constant churn with new talent coming in.
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98%x3 stars<63%x5 stars.
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W*%# T%$ F@^! did you just say…GO DAWGS!
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BYU at no. 127 with on 32% production returning yet still ends up being ranked is impressive.
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Bill C is usually great with numbers but I don’t get him here. He tells AggieBoy83 that he’s “hilariously incorrect” for saying these numbers are useless to “predict success.” Then BYUDude pretty clearly shows they didn’t “predict success” and Bill C responded that they weren’t intended to “predict success”, just “improvement and regression.” Seems to me that AggieBoy83 was actually right – if they weren’t intended to do that, why didn’t Bill say so last April?.
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14 preseason teams ranked in the top 25 preseason fell out most in last 25 years, so yea this was an anomaly, a super senior loaded year + covid free year + transfers which created upsets galore. We saw this coming so Connellys stats are similar to what Phil Steele uses & work over normal seasons, outside of what we had last 2 years.
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I wonder what the impact of “returning aggregate line starts” is. I feel like it’s probably high.
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Returning WR production matters more than O-Line experience–even though you would think it’s the opposite.
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I think returning Junior and Senior leadership is really important. Us this year (? Of NFL draft picks), Bama the year before (10 NFL draft picks) , and LSU in 2109 (14 NFL draft picks)
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