130-team S&P+ rankings: Alabama, the surest thing in football? Well, I never

Four weeks into a given season, we never quite know what we think we know. Hot Team A is going to fall into a slump. Disappointing Team B will likely turn into what we expected. An injury is going to wreck Up-And-Comer C’s plans.

We do, however, know Bama. We always know Bama. The Crimson Tide have offensive flaws and aren’t nearly the pass-rushing force that they were a year ago.

They also just beat Vanderbilt by 59 points. Their fifth gear is still better than almost anybody else’s.

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.)

I am again including where each team would rank if there were no preseason projections involved. Predictive success requires inclusion of such projections — and in Week 4, S&P+ was over 60 percent successful against the spread for the third time this year — but I like including the non-projection rankings here. It 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 trending up or down.

Preseason projections are doing strange things to the numbers right now, simply because some teams have played two games (which means their ratings are still 80 percent based on preseason projections) and others have played four (50 percent).

That’s how Florida State (88th without projections) remains third and UCF (second without projections) is only 59th despite two dominant performances. It’s still early no matter what, but for some teams, it’s even earlier.

A couple of years ago, Washington State ranked just 67th in S&P+ despite a nine-win season. The Cougars had benefited from more than three points per game of turnovers luck and won five games by one possession, but Wazzu fans on Twitter weren’t impressed with how unimpressed S&P+ was by their team. Go figure.

So far in 2017, Wazzu ranks 21st in S&P+, eighth without preseason projections. We’ll see if the Cougs can keep it up, but at least this proves that S&P+ isn’t specifically formulated to underestimate orthodox air raid teams, huh?

By the way, if you’re wondering how WVU moved up despite struggling to put Kansas away on Saturday, know that because of a lack of returning production, the Mountaineers’ preseason projections were terribly unfriendly. Simply phasing them out offsets the damage WVU thought about doing to itself in Lawrence.

The less said about Temple’s hapless performance against USF, the better.

Everything I said about WVU can also be applied to Baylor here. Matt Rhule’s Bears played like a real football team for the first time all year and threw a scare into Oklahoma, but they were being propped up by positive preseason numbers, so phasing them out offset anything good they did against the Sooners.