The best teams in college football and the ones most deserving of a national title shot don't always overlap perfectly in a Venn diagram. If you go 13-0 with a bunch of close and unlikely wins, you might not be one of the best teams in the country, but you deserve a title chance. Consequently, if you beat 10 mostly good teams by mostly huge margins but slip up twice and don't win your conference title, you probably don't deserve a spot in a four-team field even if you're definitively awesome.
In 2019, the teams ranked first, third, fourth and sixth in the end-of-regular-season SP+ ratings reached the College Football Playoff. In 2020, it was the top three teams and No. 9. But in 2021, we came closer to perfect overlap. The four teams that will play in this year's CFP currently rank first, third, fourth and fifth. No. 2 Ohio State is an outlier of the "look great 10 times but lose twice" category listed above, and the Buckeyes will go to the Rose Bowl instead of the CFP because of it, but four absolutely fantastic teams will play in the semis.
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.
Yes, Georgia remains No. 1 after its demoralizing loss to Alabama in the SEC championship. That was all but guaranteed because of the Bulldogs' enormous advantage over the field heading into the weekend. The Dawgs were 5.5 points ahead of Ohio State, 7.3 ahead of Alabama, 9.2 ahead of Michigan and 11.5 ahead of Cincinnati a week ago, and this deep into the season one game simply isn't going to make that big of a difference.
As you see, however, the gap closed pretty significantly. The Dawgs' advantage over the field shrank by about three points against each top team, which is as big a shift as you'll see at this point in the year. And as you would expect, Alabama closed the gap on Ohio State too.
Regardless, the top seven teams remained the same as last week, while ACC champion Pitt slid back into the No. 10 spot, and Pac-12 champion Utah rose two spots to 12th. Strangely, the biggest movements of the week came from teams that lost their title games, not the ones that won - Oregon dropped from 19th to 28th following another walloping at Utah's hands, Iowa plummeted from 22nd to 32nd after losing 42-3 to Michigan, and San Diego State dropped 17 spots to 56th after losing big as a home favorite to Utah State out in the MWC.
Résumé SP+
For the last few weeks of the regular season, I've also been sharing my Resume SP+ ratings. It's a look at your actual results vs. what the average top-five team would be expected to do against your schedule. 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 Resume SP+ rating.
Resume SP+ is an attempt to look at how frequently teams are posting top-five caliber results and emphasize that how you play should matter as much as or more than who. This week's top 10:
1. Georgia: +7.8 PPG above what the average top-5 team would be projected to do against their schedule
2. Ohio State: +3.2
3. Alabama: +2.0
4. Michigan -0.6
|5. Cincinnati: -5.2
6. Notre Dame: -5.4
7. Pitt: -7.1
8. Oklahoma State: -8.4
9. Ole Miss: -8.7
10. Utah: -8.7
Again, playoff teams occupy four of the top five spots, and the team most likely to finish fifth in the CFP rankings, Notre Dame, comes in at sixth. Ohio State would be well-positioned to snare an at-large bid in an 8- or 12-team playoff but will instead head to Pasadena.
I've found that taking Resume SP+ and adding a seven-point penalty for each loss is as close as I can get to a formula that replicates how my brain thinks the CFP rankings should go. It's a solid way of combining how you have performed with the simple fact that losses should matter. Here's the loss-adjusted Resume SP+ top 10:
1. Georgia (12-1)
2. Alabama (12-1)
3. Cincinnati (13-0)
4. Michigan (12-1)
5. Ohio State (10-2)
6. Notre Dame (11-1)
7. Pitt (11-2)
8. Oklahoma State (11-2)
9. Ole Miss (10-2)
10. UTSA (12-1)
The top four is right, even if the order will turn out to be a bit different.
