A good power rating is never more antisocial than when a team loses and doesn't really move in the rankings. But when these teams lose road toss-up games to highly rated opposition, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
In two of the biggest games of Week 7, Ohio State dropped a last-minute heartbreaker at Oregon, and Ole Miss fell in overtime at LSU. Statistically, these games were almost perfect coin flips. My postgame win expectancy measure -- which takes the key stats from 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" -- say that Ohio State would have won 45% of the time and Ole Miss would have won 41% of the time. Both teams were only slightly favored and saw their SP+ ratings fall only a little bit. Consequently, neither actually saw their rankings drop. Both LSU and Oregon closed the gap on their beaten opponents, but they didn't automatically rise above them.
All of this is a long way of saying, please don't yell at me too loudly.
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.
