College football SP+ rankings after Week 7 -- The Big Ten is coming, Alabama and Clemson keep dominating - ESPN
Among teams that have played thus far, Clemson is the only one with a top-5 offense and defense, while, ho hum, Alabama only has an offense that grades out even better than Joe Burrow and LSU last year.
Alabama's current offensive SP+ rating of 48.0 adjusted points per game grades out in the 99.8 percentile.
A quick procedural note: Because of all the oddities of 2020 -- the diminished offseason practice time, the fact that we're whistling along with teams frequently missing one-quarter or one-fifth of their scholarship players for a given game, etc.
I set it up so that preseason projections were phased out more slowly than normal while we figured out the predictive effects of all these oddities.
That phasing-out process is now closer in line to how I've done things in previous years, which means that for teams that have played a handful of games now, their ratings are more reflective of how they've played to date.
That should have a positive effect on predictions, but it does bring one oddity to the table: it means teams moved up or down this week based not on Saturday's results but on previous weeks'.
Florida State, which had played nowhere near its projections to date, fell quite a bit despite beating North Carolina.
If a team made a decent jump during an off week (hello, Oklahoma State) or made a movement that wasn't in line with results to date, that's probably why.
Five teams jumped more than 10 spots this week:.
They beat two preseason contenders -- Louisiana Tech and WKU, respectively -- by a combined 72-31 on Saturday and are the only two top-75 teams in the league.
A few teams also moved down quite a bit.
First, as mentioned above, preseason projections were propping them up considerably.
Extremely unfriendly preseason projections
Their preseason SP+ rating was minus-3.2 adjusted points per game, and four games in, that's still more than 50% of their overall SP+ rating.Florida has fallen 17 spots, from third to 20th
They get less of a boost for overachieving projections in that game