You probably won't be shocked to learn this, but Georgia, the team that assumed the No. 1 ranking in SP+ nearly three months ago and just won the CFP National Championship by 58 points, has finished the season as the No. 1 team in the country, per SP+. The Bulldogs ended up with a 37.3 rating -- meaning they were regarded as 37.3 adjusted points per game better than the average college football team; their rating rose by 1.3 points after their shellacking of TCU on Monday night, while TCU's rating fell by 3.3 points. The Horned Frogs wrap up a dream season ranked eighth overall.
Below are the year-end SP+ ratings. 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.
SP+ is indeed 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.
Ranking the past 15 national champions
With only one game being played, obviously there wasn't much overall movement from last week's post-bowl rankings. But with the resounding nature of the Bulldogs' victory and the particularly high score they posted in these rankings, I thought it would be interesting to put their No. 1 ranking into context.
Georgia's 37.3 overall rating placed them in the 99.6th percentile, which is virtually identical to that of Nick Saban's best Alabama team, the 2020 rendition that tore through 13 opponents during the pandemic season. In the past 15 years, only last year's Georgia team can come close to that mark.
SP+ percentile ratings for the past 15 college football national champions:
For the most part, I think this list makes sense to the eye. All of these teams were deserving champions for the simple reason that they won the games they needed to win to become champs. But at the bottom of the list, Cam Newton and 2010 Auburn needed seven one-score victories to secure the crown; the Tigers weren't nearly as dominant as most champs, and 2014 Ohio State was a team that caught fire late in the season after losing by two touchdowns to a seven-win Virginia Tech team and laboring against a couple of other above-average-at-best opponents.
Maybe the most eye-catching ranking among those 15 is 2019 LSU at No. 7. The Tigers were brimming with NFL-level talent and were so dominant at the end of the season that they are regarded by many as the best team of the CFP era. But although their offense was absurd from start to finish, their defense was terribly mediocre until the stretch run. The end-of-season version of LSU was incredible, but SP+ is a full-season measure and saw more wire-to-wire dominance from a few other recent champs.
The most relevant point for today, however, is that this Georgia team was either the best or co-best of the recent champs, and Kirby Smart has now produced a team as good as anything Nick Saban has produced at Alabama. Saban's title count still makes him the greatest of the era (and maybe of all time), but it's scary what Georgia might be able to accomplish in the coming seasons if Smart can maintain this sort of ceiling.
