Team Ratings Trends: Week Three

We are going to dive into our data here and pull out the biggest movers (positive and negative) on an overall, offensive, and defensive basis, thus far in the 2025 season.

It’s not all in the box score.

Please keep that in mind as we take our first deep dive into the data that drives our ratings, rankings, and other tools at CFBDepth. Our numbers are all-inclusive of injuries, player-level performance and more.

As we receive more data for the 2025 season and update our playing time projections, we are seeing fluctuations in our compiled ratings for each squad. For this first article, we will stay high-level and look at the overall offense and defense ratings fluctuations. As we go along in the season, we’ll start diving into the ‘units’ like passing, rushing, pass blocking, run blocking, run/pass defense, etc…

These are the talent level (compiled ratings of players with projected playing time), meant to be more of a predictive model than a look back based solely on statistics. I hope this makes sense. Regardless, let’s start diving in.

Here is a screenshot from the tool (of which our loyal CFBDepth+ subscribers will have access to):

We’ll sort by the ‘All-In Ranking’ (AIR) of the team. This includes the talent level by the numbers and other factors, such as depth, coaching/play-calling, and more.

The first three columns represent the ‘seasonal’ trend. So, we snapshot before they played their first snap of the 2025 season and compare that to their current rating. The trend column shows the difference in those two metrics.

As you can see, the Missouri Tigers have jumped +2.23 ratings points from where we had them to start the season. If you scrolled down in the numbers, you’ll notice that the offense is primarily to thank for this, as they are +3.87 in that metric. The defense is up slightly as well (+0.22), while the specialists took a big hit (-4.18) primarily due to the loss of starting kicker Blake Craig.

In another example, we see that the Florida Gators still hold on to a top ten AIR ranking, despite a well-documented loss to South Florida in week two. The numbers don’t show a significant decrease in on-field performance despite that loss. This is meant to help us from overreacting to one result.

---

INSIGHTS ::::::

If you aren’t interested in diving into the data (sure, it can be overwhelming), then just keep reading and we’ll let you know what we are seeing.

BIGGEST (+) MOVERS - OVERALL ::::::

We mentioned the Tigers above, but here is a quick look at the top five positive movers OVERALL thus far this season:

Missouri Tigers (+2.23)

The Tigers have an easy win over Central Arkansas and then an impressive outing in the revival of the Border War against Kansas. That game looked closer than it was and nobody is claiming that the Jayhawks are the ‘85 Bears defensively, but it was an impressive offensive performance nonetheless. The numbers suggest that dynamic offense (one of the question marks coming in) is taking shape early in 2025 and the Tigers are cooking with gas.

Appalachian State Mountaineers (+1.80)

Our numbers did not love this transitioning program under new head coach Dowell Loggains, and it must be said that they have played two extremely ‘soft’ opponents to start the season, beating Charlotte and FCS Lindenwood (by just seven).