Michigan needed to put together a solid 60 minutes of football on Saturday, and it certainly did to the tune of a 45-20 victory over Maryland. However, the win didn’t do much to change its advanced metrics, as Michigan didn’t move in the latest edition of ESPN and Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings after Week 13.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with SP+, Connelly calls it, “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.” SP+ takes into account a team’s efficiencies on offense, defense, and special teams and boils them down to one uniform metric that can be used to predict how many points a given team would beat (or lose to) the “average” college football team by on a neutral field.
The Wolverines are ranked as the No. 22 team in the country, with an SP+ rating of 15.2 following their win over Maryland on Saturday. In other words, SP+ predicts Michigan should defeat the “average” team by 15.2 points on a neutral field.
Looking ahead to next week, Michigan has a date with the SP+’s No. 1 team in Ohio State. Currently, the Buckeyes have a rating of 32.4, suggesting Ohio State should cruise to about a 17-point victory on Saturday.
Elsewhere in the Big Ten, Indiana and Oregon both held onto their spots inside the top-five at No. 2 and No. 4, respectively. A little bit further down, Penn State moved up two spots to No. 17 after a big win over Nebraska. Meanwhile, after losing on the road in Eugene, USC plummeted six spots down to No. 19. Iowa also dropped six spots and sits right in front of Michigan at No. 21 after narrowly beating Michigan State at home.
