Heading into November, college football's hierarchy is pretty well-established: Defense-driven Georgia and offense-driven Ohio State are the teams playing at the highest overall level, Alabama rounds out the top three ... and there's a chasm separating those three from everyone else.
Both the Buckeyes and Crimson Tide have suffered losses this season and could be one more upset away from elimination in the College Football Playoff race. But a predictive system like SP+ trusts them far more than the rest of the field.
In the updated SP+ ratings, Ohio State and Georgia are 3.1 and 2.4 points ahead of Bama, respectively, and Bama is at least 3.8 points ahead of everyone else. Early-season upsets could create some late-season drama, but when it comes to projected level of play moving forward, we know who the top teams are.
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.
It is, as always, 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. It is a look at how teams should likely perform moving forward.
SP+ 2021 history: Preseason | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8
Click here for the full rankings after Week 9.
While I emphasize the distance between the top three and the field, I should probably also acknowledge which team actually ranks fourth: Clemson. Again. As I've written in recent weeks, the Tigers have befuddled SP+ this year. As most proper predictive measures do, it takes priors into account -- as in, performance beyond simply what has happened so far this season -- and those priors continue to give them a boost in the overall ratings. Clemson's offensive collapse in 2021 has been almost unprecedented, but those priors are keeping it propped up at only 46th in offensive SP+. Meanwhile, though its rating continues to fall each week, no one has risen to catch it. Teams like Oklahoma, Michigan, Cincinnati, Notre Dame and Michigan State all made up ground this week but haven't caught the Tigers yet.
Priors are used because they make ratings more predictive, and SP+ remains among the best ratings you'll find from the perspective of average absolute error -- the distance between the projected and actual scoring margins for a given game. But while there are always outliers in a system like this, Clemson is a particularly visible one. (Wisconsin is another one, but if the Badgers hadn't dropped from the top 10 before Saturday, they certainly weren't going to after a dominant win over Iowa.) The Tigers' rating will continue to fall as priors continue to carry less weight from week to week, but it's still higher than you'd expect at this point.
Biggest movers
It gets harder to make big moves this deep into the season, but a few teams pulled it off for better or worse.
Biggest jumps
Seven teams rose at least eight spots this week.
Marshall: up 14 spots from 57th to 43rd
Boise State: up 12 spots from 63rd to 51st
Nevada: up 10 spots from 72nd to 62nd
Wake Forest: up nine spots from 37th to 28th
Utah: up nine spots from 39th to 30th
Louisiana: up nine spots from 66th to 57th
Oregon: up eight spots from 31st to 23rd
Biggest stumbles
Meanwhile, eight teams fell by at least eight spots.
TCU: down 15 spots from 45th to 60th
Texas Tech: down 13 spots from 52nd to 65th
Boston College: down 13 spots from 55th to 68th
Tulsa: down 12 spots from 73rd to 85th
Kentucky: down nine spots from 36th to 45th
Virginia: down eight spots from 27th to 35th
UCLA: down eight spots from 47th to 55th
Georgia Tech: down eight spots from 50th to 58th
Résumé SP+
The first College Football Playoff rankings of the season will be released on Tuesday evening, freeing us to yell about résumés and "best versus most deserving" and "AIN'T PLAYED NOBODY" nonstop for the next month or so.
A few years ago, I crafted a measure that I felt contributed something worthwhile to the conversation. Because I'm incredibly creative, I call it résumé SP+. I look at how SP+ would project the average top-five team -- crafted from a literal average of the top five SP+ ratings -- to perform against a given team's schedule, and I compare that to a team's actual results. Your scoring margin minus this projected scoring margin equals your résumé SP+ rating.
This is an attempt to combine a lot of elements of debate -- who you've played, how you've played, actual results -- into a single number. It is similar in many ways to ESPN's strength of record, and I like what it adds to the conversation.
Here are your résumé SP+ rankings after nine weeks. I'm listing the top 15 to account for all remaining unbeaten power conference teams.
1. Georgia (8-0): +12.4 PPG over expectation
2. Ohio State (7-1): +7.5
3. Alabama (7-1): +6.5
4. Michigan (7-1): +0.0
5. Cincinnati (8-0): -1.6
6. Pitt (6-2): -3.5
7. Michigan State (8-0): -5.3
8. Penn State (5-3): -6.2
9. Ole Miss (6-2): -6.4
10. NC State (6-2): -6.6
11. Notre Dame (7-1): -6.7
12. Wake Forest (8-0): -6.8
13. Iowa (6-2): -7.9
14. Auburn (6-2): -8.5
15. Oklahoma (9-0): -9.0
Because I've set the bar at what an average top-five team would do, there are typically only about four or five teams with an average above zero. Right now, there are only three -- the same three topping the overall SP+ ratings. But obviously the current CFP debate doesn't stop with them.
The most interesting teams on this list, by far, rank fifth and 15th. Luke Fickell's Cincinnati Bearcats are and will remain lightning rods for CFP arguments for as long as they remain unbeaten. But their performance -- in terms of actual scoring margin and actual results -- against their schedule to date has been more impressive than that of any unbeaten team not named Georgia.
The Bearcats' strength of schedule may be worse, but they have dominated their schedule more than Michigan State and Wake Forest and far more than an Oklahoma team that beat Tulane by 14 fewer points than Cincinnati and beat Kansas by only 12 a week ago. Their 24-13 win over Notre Dame -- the Fighting Irish's only loss to date -- is one of the best résumé wins in the country, and they've beaten five of eight opponents by at least 19 points. They should be rewarded for this. If the CFP committee ranks Oklahoma ahead of the Bearcats on Tuesday night, it will be an absolute injustice.
To be sure, Cincinnati's level of play has slipped a bit in recent weeks. After winning in South Bend, the Bearcats also beat a decent but unspectacular UCF team by 35 points on Oct. 16. But since then, they eked out a funky win at Navy and didn't build any distance against Tulane until the fourth quarter. They're holding steady at 10th in SP+, but they could certainly do themselves some favors by laying on some style points in the coming weeks. Either way, they've done enough to rank in the CFP top four this week. If they don't, then the committee is weighing the wrong factors.