130-team S&P+ rankings: You’ll never believe who’s No. 1! Or No. 2, or No. 3, or...

Below are the new S&P+ rankings after college football’s Week 12. As you probably would have guessed, there are next to no changes at the top. It’s pretty clear which teams have been 2018’s best, and Week 12 did nothing to change that.

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 12 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.

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.)

Washington State’s 69-28 win over Arizona was one of the strangest games of the week from a statistical perspective. The Cougars destroyed a bad mediocre defense to the tune of 7.7 yards per play, and their Off. S&P+ rating rose from 37.5 adjusted points per game (15th) to 39.1 (14th) as a result.

They also let Arizona’s Khalil Tate find some more traction in the passing game than normal pre-garbage time, and the Cougs’ Def. S&P+ rating actually rose (in a bad way) from 24.3 adjusted points per game (40th) to 25.5 (43rd). So the offense improved by 1.6 points, and the defense regressed by 1.2.

Wazzu’s Special Teams S&P+ rating fell from plus-0.6 points (49th) to minus-0.3 (81st). Wazzu punter Oscar Draguicevich was shaky in his three attempts (34.3 net yards per kick), but Blake Mazza’s missed 27-yard field goal in the third quarter was particularly costly. Field goal efficiency is judged by expected points, and the expected value of a 27-yard field goal is 2.54 points since they’re made 85 percent of the time.

That single miss flipped Mazza’s average from plus-0.1 net points per kick to minus-0.7, and since place-kicking is worth the most value in the Special Teams S&P+ equation (because it’s the most predictive and stable, believe it or not), that meant a net drop in Wazzu’s S&P+ rating despite a resounding win. And since there’s almost no separation between the No. 10 and No. 22 teams (just 2.4 adjusted points per game, top to bottom), that means a fall in the ratings.

Predictive numbers are cranky and anti-social sometimes.

Joe Moorhead’s Mississippi State Bulldogs absolutely destroyed Arkansas, 52-6, on Saturday. Is Arkansas very good? Not at all — the Hogs are 2-9 and 87th in S&P+. But nobody else, not even Alabama, did to them what MSU did.

Combined with the fact that the teams in that 10-22 range are so bunched together, this performance allowed the Bulldogs to leap eight spots. There’s always movement in the middle of the rankings, but an eight-spot jump in the top 20 is tough to pull off.

UConn’s Def. S&P+ rating is currently 52.6 adjusted points per game. It probably goes without saying that that’s last in FBS. But that doesn’t really tell the whole tale: the Husky defense is 7.9 points worse than the second-worst defense.

Actually, you know what? Hold that thought. I’ll have to write about this later in the week.

Minnesota has truly had one of the most bipolar seasons you’ll ever see. Over the course of 12 weeks, P.J. Fleck’s Gophers have now either risen or fallen by at least 10 spots eight times. They’ve risen by 37, 10, and 23 spots at different times, and they’ve fallen by 10, 17, 14, 17, and 14 spots. That’s not supposed to happen, and it doesn’t for almost anyone.

Just in the last five weeks, Minnesota has dropped 14 spots for getting destroyed by Nebraska, risen eight spots for beating Indiana, dropped 17 spots for getting blown out by Illinois, risen 23 spots for blowing out Purdue, and now dropped 14 spots for a disappointing performance against Northwestern. One would assume they’d finish their season with a loss at Wisconsin, but “assume” and “Minnesota” don’t really work in the same sentence this year.

A unique week of movement here. The top and bottom conferences each improved by decent amounts, and almost everyone else regressed slightly.

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.