Week 11 of the college football season was ... messy. The Pac-12 devoured itself, as it is wont to do. UConn reached bowl eligibility. Vanderbilt not only beat an SEC opponent for the first time in a while but beat a ranked opponent on the road. Arkansas State tried to lose to UMass. Weird day.
Among the top teams, however, not much changed: Georgia, Ohio State and Michigan continued to look like the best teams in the country, and Alabama and Tennessee continued with their typical level of quality.
Below are this week's SP+ rankings. There are no changes in the top five.
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.