2022 Big Ten football talent rankings
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Happy August, everyone. Good news: Actual college football games will be played this month! And while Michigan’s season won’t kick off until a week later in early September, it’s still a very (very!) welcome sight here over at Scott Bell’s Newsletter. Not only will Michigan be getting the chance to defend a Big Ten Championship on the gridiron for the first time in more than 15 years, it will mark the end of what has been one of the more obnoxious offseasons in quite some time.
I’m thrilled to get to write about some actual on-field stuff and take a break from writing out the letters N I and L for a bit, plus anything on recruiting. The latter two topics are obviously still important to the long-term health of this program, but there are only so many different ways you can give the same answer to the same question over a months-long stretch.
With that in mind, I want to kick off some season preview material that will continue to roll out over this final month of the offseason with my first-ever Big Ten football talent rankings.
All season long, I’ll do weekly Big Ten Power Rankings based on how the season is going and how I project the rest of the season to go. But I decided to make my preseason ranks be as talent-centric as possible to give myself an excuse to tackle this type of exercise.
The plan: I rank each major position group from 1-14. Then I assign point values for each place, add up all of the points after all position groups have been ranked and end up with an overall talent ranking of all Big Ten schools, 1-14, based on the points they earned. Here’s what each place will be worth:
1st place: 20 points
2nd place: 15 points
3rd place: 10 points
4th place: 8 points
5th place: 6 points
6th place: 5 points
7th place: 4 points
8th place: 3 points
9th place: 2 points
10th place: 1 points
11th place or worse: 0 points
One thing to note before jumping right into the rankings: These rankings look at the talent on each school’s roster — not just an individual player on that roster. For example: I may think Wisconsin RB Braelon Allen is better than Blake Corum or Donovan Edwards when sizing them both up in 1-on-1 comparisons. But in my book, the tandem of Corum and Edwards is more valuable than Allen and any other RB on that Wisconsin roster, so Michigan would get the nod over Wisconsin in my RB rankings.
With that out of the way, let’s dig in: