Unlike last year, when the College Football Playoff committee overthought itself into making a very regrettable decision (Alabama over unbeaten Florida State), it kept things rather simple this season, picking the most deserving teams, not the best teams, to play in the 12-team CFP. That's the way things should be.
But according to SP+, a bracket featuring the best teams would have looked awfully different. The CFP will not feature two of the five best teams in the country, and the single best team is the No. 8 seed. Still, in a year in which the main story has been the extreme clustering of the teams at the top -- this week's top eight teams are separated by just 3.1 points -- there are still plenty of elite teams vying to make a title run.
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.
Now more than ever: 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.
