Michigan had a chance to pull off the upset on Saturday against Indiana at the Big House, but a lack of offense has the Wolverines once again in the loss column, sitting at 4-3 on the year and 1-3 in Big Ten play. After the loss, Michigan dropped in the latest edition of ESPN and Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, now sitting at No. 27.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with SP+, Connelly describes it as “A tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the
most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking.”
Teams are judged based on their efficiencies on offense, defense, and special teams and given one uniform SP+ rating, which can be used to determine how many points that team would beat (or lose to) the “average college football team by. In Michigan’s case, its SP+ rating is 11.5, meaning it should beat the ”average” college football team by 11.5 points on a neutral field.
When watching Michigan play this year, it’s understandable how the team’s SP+ rating came to be. Connelly has Michigan’s defense as the third-best unit in the country, while the offense is among the worst in the nation at No. 86, and that wasn’t more evident than it was in Saturday’s game against Indiana, when the Wolverines held Indiana to just six points in regulation and still managed to lose the game.
Looking at the rest of the schedule, the road doesn’t get much easier for Michigan, as it still has three games left against higher-ranked teams: Ohio State, Oregon, and UCLA. If the rankings hold, that projects the Wolverines to finish the regular season at a paltry 6-6.
Next week, though, Michigan should have a better time, as it heads on the road to take on Rutgers. Connelly has the Scarlett Knights listed as the No. 96 team in the country with an SP+ rating of -4.9, meaning that the Wolverines should be projected to win by about two touchdowns.
