130-team S&P+ rankings: UGA isn’t going to let Bama run away with things just yet

Below are the new S&P+ rankings after college football’s Week 11.

Good predictive ratings are not résumé ratings, and they don’t give you bonus points for wins and losses. They simply compare expected output to actual output and adjust accordingly. That’s how a given team can win but plummet or lose and move up.

Through 11 weeks, the S&P+ rankings are performing well, hitting 54 percent against the spread and 52 percent on the over/under point totals for the year.

As you would hope, the absolute error — the average size of miss between projection and reality — has settled into a healthy area as well. Week 11 was S&P+’s best week yet in that regard.

If you’re interested in a decent résumé ranking of sorts, I encourage you to visit this post on strength of schedule. I created a Resume S&P+ ranking and will be updating it on Mondays throughout the rest of the season.

Below, however, are the predictive ratings, the actual S&P+.

(You can find full unit rankings, plus a yearly archive, at Football Outsiders. The offense and defense pages are updated by Monday at the latest.)

It has felt inevitable in recent weeks, but the “Alabama and Clemson separate themselves from everyone else” narrative that is quickly defining the 2018 season is a pretty new thing. Among other things, Georgia was part of that dominant class until about a month ago.

Kirby Smart’s Dawgs fell from third to sixth in S&P+ following their 36-16 loss at LSU on October 13 — not a horrible drop, but enough to fall behind not only Bama and rising Clemson, but also Oklahoma and Michigan.

Since the LSU loss, however, they’ve beaten Florida (currently 22nd in S&P+) by 17, Kentucky (top-30 at the time) by 17, and now Auburn (currently 20th) by 17. They are keeping strong teams at arm’s length, and they have been rewarded by a return to No. 3 in this week’s rankings.

The Dawgs’ run game is brilliant (outside of the red zone, at least), and while the defense is a little less efficient than it was last year, no one makes big plays on the Dawgs. Granted, UGA is still closer to Michigan and Oklahoma than Clemson. But consider this a reminder that Alabama’s path to the College Football Playoff is not bump-free ... and, perhaps more importantly, that Michigan’s spot in the current CFP top four is not guaranteed.

Good god, Minnesota. Here’s what I wrote last week, when Minnesota pulled off the week’s biggest drop.

Minnesota, meanwhile, is reeling for about the fourth different time this year. The Gophers have either risen or fallen by 10-plus spots six different times this season. S&P+ doesn’t have a read on this team, and it doesn’t appear that head coach P.J. Fleck does either.

Make that seven times rising or falling by at least 10 spots. Don’t bet on Minnesota this year, kids.

TCU was projected 22nd in the preseason and rose to 16th in week two. They were 25th by week four, 46th by week eight, and now, following a humbling 47-10 loss to WVU, they have fallen into the bottom half of FBS.

Changes from last week: the Big Ten has eked by the Big 12 for the No. 2 spot, and the MAC has landed with a thud in the bottom spot despite having six teams ranked in the top 75. (The main reason: four teams in the bottom 14.)

When I get the chance (so, maybe in the offseason), I will update previous years of S&P+ rankings to reflect these formula changes, too.

Basically, I’ve added a step to the the rankings process: after the rankings are determined, I go back and project previous games based on those ratings, and I adjust the ratings based on how much the ratings fit (or don’t fit) those results.

The adjustment isn’t enormous, and it diminishes dramatically as the season unfolds.

Testing this process for past seasons improved performance against the spread a little and, more importantly, decreased absolute error (the difference between projections and reality) quite a bit. I wouldn’t have made the move if it didn’t appear to improve performance.