Only one game remains in the 2023 college football season. Next Monday night in Houston, Michigan and Washington will face off in the College Football Playoff National Championship presented by AT&T (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN and ESPN App) after disposing of Alabama and Texas, respectively, on Monday.
Washington has made a habit of defying the numbers of late, but the Huskies are going to have to do it one more time. While ESPN BET lists Michigan as a 4.5-point favorite at the moment, SP+ sees a pretty different game: It gives the Wolverines a 12.3-point advantage. The Huskies have defied the number in each of the past two games, though. Can they do it and take home their first national title in 32 years? Or is this Michigan's moment?
Below are the updated SP+ rankings after bowl season. 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 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.
Here are the full rankings:
Bowl season movers
Let's take a look at the teams that saw the biggest change in their overall ratings. (Note: We're looking at ratings, not rankings.)
MOVING UP
Here are the 10 teams that saw their ratings rise the most:
Tennessee: up 3.2 adjusted points per game (ranking rose from 19th to 15th)
USF: up 2.9 points (from 102nd to 85th)
Georgia State: up 2.6 points (from 101st to 88th)
Ole Miss: up 2.5 points (from 14th to 13th)
Texas Tech: up 2.4 points (from 53rd to 43rd)
Texas State: up 2.4 points (from 79th to 70th)
Arizona: up 2.1 points (from 20th to 18th)
South Alabama: up 2.1 points (from 56th to 49th)
West Virginia: up 2.1 points (from 44th to 38th)
Fresno State: up 2.0 points (from 63rd to 60th)
Obviously bowl season is an odd time for evaluating teams, as lots of teams were missing key players, coaches or both from their regular-season iterations. Still, some of those teams breaking in new elements -- Tennessee, namely -- looked awfully good and rose accordingly.
Meanwhile, Georgia moved back to first overall, per SP+, with a rise of 1.7 points after an Orange Bowl shellacking of Florida State's JV team.
MOVING DOWN
Here are the 10 teams with ratings that fell the most:
Florida State: down 4.4 adjusted points per game (from eighth to ninth)
Liberty: down 3.7 points (from 21st to 33rd)
Syracuse: down 3.4 points (from 68th to 80th)
New Mexico State: down 2.9 points (from 62nd to 73rd)
North Carolina: down 2.8 points (from 27th to 40th)
Louisville: down 2.8 points (from 24th to 34th)
Eastern Michigan: down 2.7 points (from 103rd to 109th)
Penn State: down 2.6 points (from fourth to fifth)
Iowa: down 2.5 points (from 36th to 47th)
Utah State: down 2.4 points (from 97th to 106th)
In this era of heavy transfers and opt-outs (and, as always, coaching changes), a lot of teams looked like shells of their former selves. Florida State, of course, leads the way in that regard. The Seminoles got rocked by opt-outs after getting snubbed for a CFP spot, and they got demolished, 63-3, by Georgia in the Orange Bowl. Their rating dropped accordingly ... but should it have? What's the purpose of SP+ at this point in the year if there are barely any games left to project? Should I ignore the results of these extreme exhibitions?
Once the season is officially over (so, next week), I'm going to sit down and try to figure out whether the next year's SP+ projections are more accurate with or without data from bowl season. That will drive how I move forward. But in the meantime, I'm going to continue treating bowls as normal games. That's bad news for egg-layers such as FSU and Syracuse.
Conference rankings
Here are FBS' 10 conferences ranked by average SP+:
1. SEC: 11.7 average rating (32.8 offense, 22.1 defense), up 1.0 points from before bowls
2. Pac-12: 6.4 average (32.5 offense, 26.0 defense), up 0.5
3. Big Ten: 6.0 average (22.8 offense, 17.4 defense), down 0.3
4. Big 12: 5.5 average (30.9 offense, 25.6 defense), up 0.3
5. ACC: 2.9 average (26.6 offense, 24.2 defense), down 1.3
6. Sun Belt: minus-3.3 average (28.1 offense, 31.0 defense), up 0.6
7. Mountain West: minus-6.4 average (24.8 offense, 31.3 defense), down 0.2
8. AAC: minus-7.8 average (24.8 offense, 32.0 defense), up 0.4
9. Conference USA: minus-7.9 average (22.8 offense, 30.1 defense), down 1.1
10. MAC: minus-11.3 average (16.5 offense, 27.0 defense), down 0.5
The conference hierarchy was mostly set after hundreds of nonconference games, but after bowl season we did see a couple of shifts here. The Pac-12 once again passed the Big Ten, thanks to not only Washington's defeat of Texas but also wins by Arizona, UCLA and USC. That offset disappointing showings from Cal and Oregon State.
Meanwhile, the AAC eked past Conference USA, not necessarily because of its own exploits -- although USF's blowout of Syracuse helped -- but because CUSA was one of the two biggest bowl underachievers. WKU and Jacksonville State won tight games, but the conference's two best teams, Liberty and NMSU, lost their bowls to Oregon and Fresno State by a combined 82-16.
The biggest underachiever in bowl season? The ACC. FSU, Syracuse and North Carolina lost by a combined 138-13, while others like Louisville, Miami and NC State all fell after losing what SP+ thought were winnable games. Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech performed particularly well, but that wasn't enough to offset the damage.
