130-team S&P+ rankings: Fun teams like Mississippi State are rising quickly

Late September is a pretty volatile time for college football ratings. Preseason projections are getting phased out in favor of the season’s small-sample results, and ratings tend to see some rather significant week-to-week shifts.

Last week, only three teams moved up more than 10 spots in the S&P+ ratings, while only two teams moved down by more than 10. This week, six teams moved up by that amount, and eight teams moved down. We will probably see similar movement next week.

Below are this week’s S&P+ ratings. You can find full unit rankings (and a yearly archive) at Football Outsiders. (Also, if the chart below isn’t loading friendly on your mobile device, that Football Outsiders link should work.)

One thing I’ve included in this week’s table: where a team would be ranked if there were no preseason projections involved. Early in the year, you have to include projections if you want any sort of predictive success, but I figure including this both addresses a lot of questions people might have (“How is [Losing Team A] ranked so high???”) and gives you a better feel for which teams are moving up or down.

Alabama remains your top team after a businesslike win over Colorado State. The Crimson Tide have been perfectly fine this year and will likely continue to grow into themselves in the coming weeks. But two upcoming road opponents — Vanderbilt (Sept. 23) and Mississippi State (Nov. 11) — have been better if we look at nothing but this season’s results.

That Mississippi State has throttled decent FCS (Charleston Southern) and G5 teams (Louisiana Tech) was reasonably impressive. That the Bulldogs then treated LSU almost as poorly as Charleston Southern was staggering. They have been tremendous in the first three weeks of the season. S&P+ reminds us that being good for three weeks isn’t the same as being good for 15, but so far, so good, to say the least.

Meanwhile, it’s probably a very good thing for college football that its two funnest teams — Penn State and Oklahoma State — have also been two of its best teams so far.

Based solely on 2017 performance, Wake Forest has been a top-five team through three weeks. Because of this, the Deacs have moved up more than 30 spots since the start of the season. Granted, Presbyterian, Boston College, and Utah State haven’t provided the stiffest of competition, but if nothing else, Mississippi State proves that dominance of iffy teams can often be predictive of performance against better teams.

I’ve already said what I needed to regarding Missouri’s pathetic performance against Purdue, so instead we’ll use this space to talk about South Carolina.

The Gamecocks began 2017 with a series of what were toss-up games on paper. They were outgained by both NC State and Missouri but rode the Little Things™ to victory; that will eventually catch up to you, and it very much did at home against Kentucky. They actually outgained the Wildcats by five yards but fell, 23-13, and in the process lost Deebo Samuel, by far their best player, to injury. Your trajectory can change multiple times throughout a season. South Carolina’s just changed pretty drastically in a single Saturday.