There's always a bit of nuance to understanding Week 1 results, especially when 60% of them are from FBS-versus-FCS games and only a few power conference teams actually played each other. But we can at least pull a little bit of the proverbial signal out of the proverbial noise.
Alabama was particularly dominant against a Western Kentucky team that started the season among the top 10 in the Group of 5, and Texas misfired for a single drive before pummeling Colorado State. Ohio State, on the other hand, stumbled around for 25 minutes against Akron before stepping on the gas. Oregon could never quite put away a good FCS team (Idaho, which began the year 13th in my FCS SP+ rankings), while Ole Miss and Tennessee utterly destroyed Furman (17th) and Chattanooga (28th), respectively.
I always say it's how you play that matters, not who. The logic behind that always gets stretched a little bit early in the season, but SP+ still thinks it learned some things and moved teams around accordingly. The top of the rankings have quite the SEC flavor out of the gate.
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.