Michigan’s stock has dropped throughout the season to this point, but some good things happened for the Wolverines during the bye week to make their resume and quality of play perhaps look a little better. That includes a big win for Oklahoma over No. 1 Texas.
Even without playing a game this weekend, Michigan moved up three spots to No. 23 in ESPN and Bill Connelly’s post-Week 6 SP+ rankings, offering maybe a slight bit of encouragement for the weeks to come.
For those who are unfamiliar with SP+,
it’s an advanced metric that takes into account a team’s offensive, defensive, and special teams efficiencies. It combines all three of these efficiency ratings into one uniform rating that predicts how many points a given team would beat (or lose to) the “average” college football team by on a neutral field. In other words, it’s a metric designed to look at how “good” teams really are at different aspects of the game rather than ranking them purely on wins and losses as the AP poll does.
Michigan’s three-spot jump goes along with an increase of 0.7 points in its rating, putting the Wolverines at a 13.1 rating heading into Week 7. That means Michigan should beat the “average” college football team by about 13.1 points.
Looking ahead at the rest of the schedule, the Wolverines still have four teams on their schedule that are ranked higher than them, with UCLA (No. 18), Oregon (No. 12), Indiana (No. 5), and Ohio State (No. 1) all looming. That means Michigan should finish the regular season 6-6 if all goes as predicted.
Next week’s game certainly won’t be easy either, as Michigan welcomes in Penn State, which sits at 3-3 after a loss to USC last night. The Nittany Lions are ranked as the No. 38 team in the country with a 9.6 rating, meaning the Wolverines would be predicted to win by about a field goal.
We’ll see what happens when the teams take the field at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday at Michigan Stadium.
