What happens when you produce a 56% success rate to your opponent's 43%, average 8.8 yards per play to their 5.6, gain 20-plus yards on 11% of your snaps (your opponent: 5%), score touchdowns on every red zone trip and still lose as a 22.5-point favorite? If you're Alabama, falling to Vanderbilt via turnovers luck and Diego Pavia's sheer panache, a couple of things happen: First, you disrupt bachelorette parties throughout downtown Nashville when students tear down the goalposts and march them more than two miles, down Broadway and into the Cumberland River.
Second, your SP+ rating doesn't really change.
After the most monumental upset of the 2024 season -- yes, NIU beat Notre Dame in Week 2, but this is Vanderbilt vs. Alabama we're talking about here -- Kalen DeBoer's Crimson Tide remain No. 3 in this week's SP+ rankings. They did just about everything they were supposed to do to beat Vandy but fell victim to an incredible set of circumstances.
My postgame win expectancy measure -- which looks at the predictive stats produced in a given game, tosses them into the air and says, "With these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time" -- says that with this game's stats, Vandy would have won 1.8% of the time. That tops Rutgers-Washington (3.3%) and Arkansas-Auburn (6.7%) for the most unlikely win of the season.
The game could have massive implications for the SEC race -- and lord knows it was ridiculously fun to watch -- but Bama is, uh, still very good.
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.