Favorites look wobbly but survive. It has been the modus operandi of the 2023 college football season, and it played out in Week 9: Washington thought seriously about losing to Stanford, and Penn State was tied with Indiana with two minutes left, but the Huskies and Nittany Lions both ended up with nine-point wins. Ohio State ground out another win with great defense, too. But unless your name was Oklahoma or Oregon State, your grand season plans remained intact.
That doesn't mean your SP+ rating couldn't change, though. Oregon's dominant win over Utah bumped the Ducks to fourth overall, Florida State's tidy performance against Wake Forest earned a bit more of the ratings' trust, and despite another tight win, USC slipped further thanks to yet another dismal defensive performance.
The top three, however, remained the same. We began the season with Michigan, Georgia and Ohio State leading the way, and through nine weeks, that remains the case.
Below are this week's SP+ rankings. 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.
Here are the full rankings: