Florida's loss to LSU on Saturday night shook up the national title race a good amount, offering an increase in Playoff odds to both Ohio State and Texas A&M, among others. But it didn't do much to change the top SP+ ratings, where Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State -- only one of whom actually played on Saturday -- remained the top three.
North Carolina predictably jumped into the top 10 following a blowout of Miami, while the Hurricanes, like Wisconsin, fell a good amount. But as we approach Championship Weekend, last week's title-game projections are more or less this week's: Alabama will head to Atlanta as a projected 10-point favorite over the Gators, Ohio State will have about a 17-point advantage over Northwestern, and Clemson, this time with Trevor Lawrence, holds about a 5.5-point advantage in a rematch with Notre Dame.
What is SP+? In a single sentence, it's a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. I created the system at Football Outsiders in 2008, and as my experience with both college football and its stats has grown, I have made quite a few tweaks to the system.
More than ever, it's important to note that SP+ is intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a résumé ranking that gives credit for big wins or particularly brave scheduling -- no good predictive system is. It is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football. If you're lucky or unimpressive in a win, your rating will probably fall. If you're strong and unlucky in a loss, it will probably rise.
Now that we're (mercifully) approaching the end of the season, the extreme movement has slowed. So we'll focus on only the two biggest movers of the week
Biggest rise: San Jose State (from 75th to 57th)
Brent Brennan's Spartans didn't score extra points from SP+ from having to play a "home" game in Las Vegas -- on a field with New Mexico's logo and field markings, no less -- but maybe should have. Regardless, they finished off a sterling, unbeaten mini-season by outgaining Nevada by 8.9 yards per play to 5.4 and going on a 23-0 to win by 10 and clinch the MWC West division title. A memorable fall for them -- for better and for worse, I guess.
Biggest fall: Baylor (from 61st to 78th)
Quite a few exhausted teams took the field with thin depth charts on Saturday, but Baylor might have been the thinnest and most exhausted of all.
Baylor will be without 47 players, coaches, staff members and other personnel today against OSU. Baylor shut down its football facility due to COVID-19 on Thursday. But the game will be on at 2:30 p.m.
Needless to say, it didn't work out well for the Bears. They got walloped, 42-3, at home by Oklahoma State, finishing Dave Aranda's first campaign -- and almost certainly his most challenging, no matter what the future holds -- at 2-7. One can see how some of these late-season egg-layings could end up tricky for a projections system to gauge. What we saw in Waco probably doesn't have much to do with what we'll see from the Bears next fall, but the game will be part of next year's preseason projections. Odd times abound.
How to pull off the upset of the year and fall in the ratings
I talk a lot about my postgame win expectancy measure, which takes the key, predictive stats from a given game, tosses them into the air and proclaims, "With these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time." It communicates a lot of information in a short amount of time and paints a pretty clear picture in terms of which results were sound and which were pretty fluky, or at least achieved via unsustainable means.
Remember Indiana's season-opening win over Penn State, where the Hoosiers were outgained by more than 200 yards and won by literal millimeters on a two-point conversion? IU had a 5% postgame win expectancy in that game.
Rutgers' overtime win over Maryland on Saturday, which saw the Scarlet Knights average 4.2 yards per play to UM's 6.4 and recover all four of their own fumbles? 13%.
LSU's win over Florida? 0.6%. Zero! Point! Six! Percent! Florida averaged 8.2 yards per play to LSU's 4.9 and a 49% success rate to LSU's 39%. The Gators generated 10 scoring opportunities to the Tigers' six. SP+ basically saw all the game's data and said, "Man, to lose this game, Florida would've had to blow a ton of scoring chances in increasingly creative fashion, give up at least one return score, commit one of the most unfathomable penalties in the sport's history (and at the most inopportune possible time) and watch as LSU bombed in a super-long field goal through thick fog."
Check, check, check and check. Florida's CFP case is just about shot, but the Gators didn't fall in SP+ -- in fact, they rose slightly -- because, again, this is a predictive measure, and despite mistakes, Florida did enough to win this game 99.4% of the time. LSU, meanwhile, fell into the 60s. Guess I'll have to build "how many of your opponents' shoes did you throw at key moments?" into the algorithm for next year.
