The 2025 college football season is still six months away, but that didn't stop ESPN's Bill Connelly from releasing his initial SP+ rankings for the upcoming season on Thursday.

For those unfamiliar, the SP+ is defined as the following by Connelly.

"It's a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking. Along those same lines, these projections aren't intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather."

The SP+ rankings take into account returning production, recent recruiting, and recent history for each program.

The Gophers finished last season as the No. 27 team in the SP+ rankings with the 81st ranked offense and the 11th ranked defense nationally according to the rating system. Now with a new season slowly approaching, the Gophers have fallen slightly down the SP+ rankings to No. 37 in the country.

The Gophers according to the SP+ currently enter the season with the 98th best offense in the country and the 11th best defense. Their special teams unit ranked squarely between the two at No. 64.

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Notably earlier this week, the Gophers were ranked 40th in the SP+ initial returning production rankings with 50% of their production returning on offense, which ranks 83rd nationally and 73% returning on defense, ranking 11th nationally.

Big Ten teams ranked ahead of Minnesota in the initial SP+ rankings include No. 1 Ohio State, No. 3 Penn State, No. 6 Oregon, No. 13 Michigan, No. 21 Iowa, No. 24 Indiana, No. 25 Illinois, No. 30 USC, and No. 34 Nebraska.

When it comes to the Gophers' 2025 schedule, here's how each team is ranked in the initial SP+ rankings.

Buffalo - 96
Northwestern State - N/A
Cal - 58
Rutgers - 43
Ohio State - 1
Purdue - 116
Nebraska - 34
Iowa - 21
Michigan State - 76
Oregon - 6
Northwestern - 87
Wisconsin - 41

In 2025, Minnesota will look to build off an 8-5 campaign in 2024 that saw the Gophers win seven games in the regular season before capping off their year with a Duke's Mayo Bowl victory over Virginia Tech.

The eight-win season was the fourth time in the last six seasons that the program had won at least eight games. The Gophers' bowl victory was also the program's eighth straight bowl win dating back to the 2015 season.

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