Michigan came out of its bye week and earned a 21-18 win over Penn State. The Wolverines started sloppy in the first half, but turned to freshman Tommy Carr as its quarterback in the second half and rode the momentum he provided to victory.
With Michigan trending in a new direction with a new quarterback at the helm of the offense, you’d expect the outlook to change for the rest of the season, but ESPN and Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings aren’t totally sold yet, as the Wolverines stayed at No. 23 after
this week’s win. They’d moved up three spots to get there last week despite not playing a game.
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.”
Any given team is judged based on its 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 13.0, meaning it should beat the ”average” college football team by 13.0 points on a neutral field.
By looking closer at Michigan’s rating, it’s not a surprise to see how it’s put together. SP+ ranks Michigan’s defense as the third-best in the country behind only Ohio State and Indiana. Offense and special teams are at No. 76 and No. 79, respectively – both numbers you’d want to see rise over the second half of the year to see Michigan move up the overall rankings.
Looking at the rest of the schedule, Michigan still has four teams ranked ahead of it: Ohio State (No. 1), Indiana (No. 5), Oregon (No. 11), and UCLA (No. 19).
The Wolverines will undoubtedly get their stiffest test of the season to this point when they welcome in the defending national champions in Indiana this Saturday. Indiana’s SP+ rating is 23.6 after its loss to Ohio State, meaning that the Hoosiers are projected to win by 10.6 points on a neutral field. Fortunately, Michigan gets the advantage of playing at home, which should narrow the gap by two or three points.
We’ll see if Michigan’s momentum it generated in the win over Penn State can carry over and turn into a narrative-shifting win over Indiana when the teams take the field at noon on Saturday.
