Well that was interesting. Week 2 of the 2024 college football season didn't give us many earth-shattering results beyond Notre Dame's upset loss to Northern Illinois, but it felt like about half the teams in the top 25 flirted with disaster. Few teams have looked genuinely awesome twice, and we head into Week 3 not knowing what to think about countless teams. Honestly, that's a pretty fun place to be.
SP+ is in the same boat. It trusts about five teams right now, and the distance between No. 1 Georgia and No. 10 Miami is about the same as the distance between Miami and No. 41 West Virginia. There's a huge batch of teams it's still trying to figure out.
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.