Are you seeing how much respect the Big 12 conferences getting?

I know that the football season is, gee, six months away, but you're going to like this if you are

itching for football season like I am. I'm Pete Mundo. We're Heartland College Sports Weekly.

Part of Heartlandcollege Sports.com, your independent, big 12, digital media outlet. It's great to be here

with you for another week. And once again, we are a ways off. But there were two things that came

out this week that I want to share with you around why the Big 12 is getting so much well-deserved

respect. It starts off with ESPN's FPI rankings. Now, you're probably like, oh, ESPN, I hate ESPN too. Okay. We're on the same page

there. We are on the same page there. No if fans or butts. But let's just share with you what this

means for the big 12 and what exactly is going on here. FPI, which is the football power index, is a rating system designed to measure

team strength and project performance going forward. The goal is not to rank the teams. It is to

correctly predict games and season outcomes. If Vegas ever published the power rankings it

uses to set its lines, they would likely look quite a lot like FPI.

ESPN ads, this is not a playoff predictor.

It is not designed to identify the four teams most deserving of making the college football playoff.

But it is an indicator, right?

It certainly seems like it's better than, you know, the AP poll, the coaches poll where

you've got journalists who are incredibly biased or the coaches poll where you have

coaches who are incredibly biased voting on the top 25.

This seems like at least it's somewhat mathematics based, which I give ESPN credit for.

And this week we found out the top 10 in the ESPN FPI preseason top 10.

Here's the top 10 college football at this point in time for the ESPN FPI Football Power Index.

Number one, Alabama.

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