Kentucky soars up in the ESPN FPI Rankings after upset of Ole Miss

The Kentucky Wildcats went into Oxford, Mississippi, to take on the sixth-best team in the nation, according to the AP poll, and knocked them off.

That impressive performance moved them up a lot in the ESPN FPI, which stands for the Football Power Index. Which is an analytics tool that analyzes every team and gives them a score. Here is howESPN describes it, "The Football Power Index (FPI) is a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team's performance going forward for the rest of the season. FPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. Projected results are based on 20,000 simulations of the rest of the season using FPI, results to date, and the remaining schedule."

Kentucky vaults all the way up to the 23rd team in the nation in FPI. There are currently only two teams tied above them: the Texas Longhorns and the Alabama Crimson Tide at the very top, making the Wildcats the true 23rd-best team according to the FPI.

Kentucky has an FPI score of 9.5 which means they are 9.5 points better than average. The top teams have a 27.9 in score. The Wildcats rank as the 10th-best SEC team on this list, with the teams above them Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Missouri, LSU, Oklahoma, and Texas A&M as the teams ahead of them (in that order).

Kentucky was 38th last week, moving 15 spots up the list, which makes them the team that rose the most in the top 25. The only other team that was close was Kansas State, which moved up 12 spots with its big win over Oklahoma State.

The Iowa Hawkeyes are slightly behind them at 9.3, and the team in front of them is the Iowa State Cyclones, with a score of 10.6. Kentucky finds itself sandwiched between two rivals from the state of Iowa. The only team to beat the Wildcats by a significant margin this season is the South Carolina Gamecocks, who are a couple of spots behind Kentucky with a score of 9.1.

Currently, the FPI has the Kentucky Wildcats as an 83% chance to win six games or better, which was only at 40% last week, a dramatic rise of 43%! The FPI has given Kentucky a 2.6% chance to make the playoffs (up from 0.2% from a week ago). The win against Ole Miss was monumental not only for the Wildcat's season but also for catapulting them up the FPI rankings.