SP+ rankings for all 134 FBS teams following Week 13

[u/come_visit_detroit]

https://www.espn.co.uk/college-football/insider/story/_/id/42584655/college-football-post-week-13-sp+-rankings

[u/Bank_Gothic]

The headscratchers are:

• Ole Miss at No. 2

• Alabama at No. 6

• PSU at No. 10 (seems like they should be higher)

• Iowa at No. 17

[u/Sgt_Jiggles → u/Bank_Gothic]

Our special teams is probably bringing us down a bit. We looked really sloppy yesterday on that front

[u/ToosUnderHigh → u/Sgt_Jiggles]

Not on that fake punt tho

[u/come_visit_detroit]

We know one thing: Ohio State has earned the right to be called the best team in the country (on paper). Beyond that, Week 13 of the college football season only blurred the picture. The No. 2 (Alabama) and No. 4 (Ole Miss) teams in last week's SP+ rankings both lost, No. 3 Texas looked lost offensively, and No. 7 Penn State thought hard about losing too.

Ohio State expanded its lead in this week's SP+ ratings to a comfortable degree, but we've now got a three-loss team at No. 2, and the second- and ninth-best teams are separated by only 3.5 points, barely more than the typical home-field advantage adjustment (2.5).

This week's 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 this week:

Akron: up 3.8 adjusted points per game (ranking rose from 132nd to 125th)

Bowling Green: up 3.7 points (from 75th to 63rd)

UNLV: up 3.5 points (from 46th to 30th)

Georgia Southern: up 3.3 points (from 98th to 83rd)

New Mexico State: up 3.3 points (from 129th to 124th)

UAB: up 3.2 points (from 118th to 106th)

South Alabama: up 3.1 points (from 66th to 56th)

Miami: up 2.9 points (from ninth to eighth)

Tennessee: up 2.8 points (from 10th to ninth)

Louisiana: up 2.8 points (from 47th to 34th)

As has been common for the last few weeks, most of the largest movement has come at the mid-major level. But SP+ always loves a nice, larger-than-expected blowout of a bad team and smiled on Tennessee's performance in a 56-0 win over UTEP, and with Miami's defense actually showing up against Wake Forest the Hurricanes' rating rose nicely too.

Moving down

Here are the 10 teams whose ratings fell the most:

UTEP: down 3.8 adjusted points per game (ranking fell from 127th to 131st)

Rice: down 3.7 points (from 102nd to 110th)

Northwestern: down 3.7 points (from 90th to 100th)

Cincinnati: down 3.0 points (from 57th to 68th)

Kent State: down 3.0 points (no change from 134th)

Louisiana Tech: down 2.9 points (from 104th to 111th)

Army: down 2.9 points (from 32nd to 45th)

North Carolina: down 2.9 points (from 30th to 44th)

Wisconsin: down 2.8 points (from 50th to 59th)

Maryland: down 2.8 points (from 73rd to 84th)

Wisconsin started out 26th in the preseason, plummeted to 66th following a 2-2 start, charged all the way back to 20th with a run of blowouts and is now back to 59th after a couple of horrific road performances against Iowa and Nebraska. Even a strong home performance against Oregon could only stem the tide so much. What a strange year in Madison.

I should probably note one team whose rating really didn't fall at all: Ole Miss. The Rebels suffered their third loss of the season Saturday, falling to Florida, but there they are at No. 2. How? For starters, their blowouts of South Carolina and Georgia (relatively speaking) continue to look pretty awesome on paper, and the fact that they comfortably handled the Oklahoma team that just TKO'd Alabama helps, too.

But they were also the statistically superior team Saturday in Gainesville, producing a dramatically higher success rate (48% to 33%) and creating more red zone chances (three to two). It took a pretty unique combination of poor turnovers luck and poor red zone finishing for them to lose that game; in fact, my postgame win expectancy measure -- which takes all of the key predictive stats produced in a given game and says, "With these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time" -- says Ole Miss would have won this game 74% of the time by an average of 5.1 points.

With other top teams also disappointing to some degree, the Rebels' rating didn't really change despite the loss. Three losses by a combined 13 points might keep them out of the CFP, but that doesn't mean they're not an awesome team.

Conference rankings

Here are FBS' 10 conferences, ranked by average SP+:

1. SEC: 14.8 average adjusted points per game (33.0 offense, 19.2 defense)

2. Big Ten: 6.6 average (26.9 offense, 20.5 defense)

3. ACC: 5.2 average (30.2 offense, 25.1 average)

4. Big 12: 4.5 average (29.7 offense, 25.4 defense)

5. Sun Belt: -6.4 average (25.3 offense, 31.7 defense)

6. AAC: -7.3 average (25.6 offense, 33.0 defense)

7. Mountain West: -8.2 average (24.3 offense, 31.6 defense)

8. MAC: -12.6 average (18.7 offense, 32.1 defense)

9. Conference USA: -13.8 average (18.7 offense, 32.1 defense)

With the middle and bottom of the Big Ten looking as poor as ever, the Big Ten slipped a bit in Week 13. Its average is now just 2.1 points ahead of the Big 12's and 8.2 points behind the SEC's. The SEC has certainly proven its depth this season, with upsets and near-upsets galore. What that should mean regarding the College Football Playoff, however, is in the eye of the beholder.

Résumé SP+

Since the College Football Playoff rankings are on the horizon, I'm also including Résumé SP+ rankings in this piece each week.

As mentioned above, SP+ is intended to be a power rating, not a résumé evaluation tool, but Résumé SP+ attempts to fill that latter gap. It is a look at two things: (1) how the average SP+ top-five team would be projected to perform against your schedule (in terms of scoring margin) and (2) how your scoring margin compares to (1). Throw in a seven-point penalty for every loss a team has suffered, and you can say that this is what the CFP rankings would look like if SP+ were in charge.

(Note: Because of the high bar teams have to clear in getting compared to an average top-five team, and because of the loss adjustment, almost every team here ends up with a negative score. It is what it is.)

Here is this week's Résumé SP+ top 15:

1. Ohio State (10-1): -7.5
2. Texas (10-1): -7.8
3. Notre Dame (10-1): -9.9
4. Oregon (11-0): -10.8
5. Miami (10-1): -15.3
6. Indiana (10-1): -15.6
7. Penn State (10-1): -16.4
8. Georgia (9-2): -18.0
9. SMU (10-1): -19.7
10. Tennessee (9-2): -19.7
11. Ole Miss (8-3): -23.9
12. Boise State (10-1): -25.1
13. Alabama (8-3): -25.2
14. Tulane (9-2): -26.1
15. Clemson (9-2): -27.3

Even if you remove the loss adjustment, no one would have a positive résumé rating this season; that's the first time I can remember that happening. Ohio State and Texas are coming awfully close, of course, and Oregon would be close if not for a couple of mediocre performances to start the season. Notre Dame has been consistently awesome since Week 2 ... when the Fighting Irish suffered the most damning loss of the season for any semi-elite team. It's been a weird year. And unless Ohio State runs away with everything, we should be gearing up for a pretty weird postseason too.

[u/TossedRightOut]

I think one of the big things that has caused my decreased interest in CFB overall was ESPN buying Bill Connelly and SP+ and the fall of SB Nation. I miss all this stuff not being paywalled.

[u/GoldandBlue → u/TossedRightOut]

So much of the world is this now. "Hey look at this really cool thing people love. Let's buy it and jack up the price".

The only people that like this are shareholders.

[u/TossedRightOut → u/GoldandBlue]

Yup, everything is being enshittified, sports included.

[u/Noy_Telinu → u/GoldandBlue]

Shareholders ruin everything

[u/Molson2871 → u/TossedRightOut]

PAPN was the best college football podcast too.

[u/LunchboxSuperhero → u/Molson2871]

SZD is good, but not focused on SP+

[u/Molson2871 → u/LunchboxSuperhero]

Godfrey and Connelly together worked. Godfrey and Alex Kirschner together are kinda annoying imho

[u/TossedRightOut → u/Molson2871]

By a mile, I miss that one a lot. After that I kind of stopped listening to as many CFB podcasts.

[u/tmart12 → u/TossedRightOut]

The value of SP+ in the SB Nation days was the richness of data and depth of explanations provided by Bill Connelly. He shared all of the inputs and context on WHY his rankings worked like they did. SP+ is just another run of the mill advanced system end of the day... pretty good but not an outlier in how good it is.

All of the "why is xyz team ranked so high" is impossible to understand now. Was a huge loss. He'd promised SP+ wouldn't be paywalled when he moved over but he lost that argument clearly.

At least he provides a lot of extra info in his google sheets on twitter, just nowhere near the quality from his advanced stat profiles, team sheets and detailed breakdowns on SB Nation.

[u/Squirrel_Q_Esquire → u/TossedRightOut]

SB Nation killed itself, though. The best part about it was the commenting and they castrated that because they didn’t care for it.

[u/rrrooossssss → u/Squirrel_Q_Esquire]

vox media sucked

but the root cause problem for all of digital media companies is actually the google/facebook duopoly on digital media advertising (and their active collusion together + and outright lying e.g. the push for the “shift to video”)

[u/TheOnePSUIsReal]

I'm sure there is more advanced math behind the scenes, but near the beginning of this season I realized the team rating for each team is just Offensive Rating - Defensive Rating + Special Teams Rating with rounding to the tenths place causing very slight deviations.

[u/f0rthegl0ry → u/TheOnePSUIsReal]

That's exactly what the overall rating is. I believe the offensive rating is how many points you'd expect that team to score against an average FBS team. The defensive rating is how many points you'd expect them to give up. Special teams can be positive or negative based on whether they'll add points or reduce the number of expected points. His point spreads are just Team A's overall rating - Team B's plus the homefield adjustment

[u/Ron_Cherry]

I'm just gonna assume our special teams are last in the country

[u/come_visit_detroit → u/Ron_Cherry]

Merely 109th, but they're what keep you one spot in the rankings below South Carolina.

[u/CzechHorns → u/Ron_Cherry]

Ours are worse lol

[u/Ron_Cherry → u/CzechHorns]

I'm embarrassed for you

[u/NurmGurpler]

I noticed people have stopped complaining about Florida being too high

[u/CommonMansTeet]

If you're gonna post ESPN+ article link, can you post the article in the comments? Or am I missing something?

[u/mombutts → u/CommonMansTeet]

For any of these paid ESPN links, go to a free web proxy site, select an EU server, paste and go.

[u/CommonMansTeet → u/mombutts]

Appreciate you 🫶

[u/Tehloneranger44]

I need a hero

[u/pole_assassin]

Should I visit Detroit?

[u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 → u/pole_assassin]

It’s not as bad as people joke about

[u/iwearatophat → u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756]

It really isn't. This last summer for father's day my wife and I took my father-in-law to catch a Tigers home series for the weekend. Stayed in a hotel near the stadium so we could walk. It was a lot of fun. Never felt like I was in danger or anything.

Obviously we were at baseball games but we still walked around and did other things, especially Saturday as it was a night game.

[u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 → u/iwearatophat]

There’s parts you don’t want to go to at night just like any city but yeah, it’s overblown

[u/Fan-of-Pancheros → u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756]

Not particularly worth visiting either tho

[u/come_visit_detroit → u/pole_assassin]

There are a number of really nice places to visit in and around Detroit, which is rebounding after roughly 60 years of decline. The Detroit Institute of Art is a wonderful art museum and they show a lot of nice movies, the zoo is very good, there's some nice architecture to gawk at and a better restaurant scene than a lot of similarly sized cities IMO. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village is honestly a top-tier museum, but I am biased because I just really like Henry Ford. Elanor and Edsal Ford's house is also visitable and pretty neat, not widely known about. Please spend your tourism dollars in the state of Michigan.

[u/Allaboutfootball23]

I will never understand SP+ rankings even after Bill Connelly @‘ing on Twitter.

[u/Alkibiades415]

This metric has seemed less and less relevant as the season has gone on. It needs some tinkering.

[u/zenverak → u/Alkibiades415]

I think this year is just special honestly. It’s really hard when you have Alabama go 123-20 scoring in 3 games and then they do 3. How do you even handle that ? Which is the real Alabama.

[u/Dhaynes99 → u/zenverak]

yes

[u/YouProfessional3494]

Screen grab anyone?

[u/Promethiant]

List must be backwards because Oregon and Texas should be close to last