WKU Football: ESPN’s FPI Forecast Tops to go .500 in 2019

It’s that time of the year again! ESPN has released their Football Power Index rankings, or FPI, for the 2019 season, including a Top 25…

It’s that time of the year again! ESPN has released their Football Power Index rankings, or FPI, for the 2019 season, including a Top 25 (that also includes a 1–130 ranking of each FBS team) as well as game-by-game predictions for each team.

The Hilltoppers open the 2019 season as ESPN’s #94 overall team (the seventh-best mark in Conference USA), with a projected record of 6.2–5.9, or, 6–6.

Here’s a game-by-game breakdown, per ESPN’s FPI.

At first glance of the schedule, a couple of things are surprising:

• The very low percentage given against teams like Louisville and Marshall, both of who the Tops were a play or two away from defeating last year.

• By the same token, the Tops are given a surprisingly high percentage against teams like ODU and MTSU. Have the Raiders fallen that far from last year even without Stockstill? That was one of the few competitions where the Tops’ weren’t even competitive, so to see them favored so large is kind of shocking.

• Also, over 60% favorites against UAB is…kind of shocking to me even though they lose a ton of production.

I haven’t been anywhere near as vocal about this coming season as I was last season, but I do believe this football team will be better (I reiterate my main argument from last offseason; how could they not be? Well, we learned that the hard way). But are they sure-fire favorites against UAB, MTSU better?

Here’s what WKU’s FPI looked like at the outset of the 2018 campaign:

Compared to their full results:

Let's hope the Tops’ play a bit closer to their FPI projections this year than they wound up doing so last year.