Rankings Graphical Roundup after Week 1: AP, Coaches, SP
In case you want to compare to earlier rankings, the post with the preseason rankings is here.
Keep in mind that, in all graphs except for the last two, the SP+ numbers are rankings of the 133 FBS teams and NOT the raw ratings. So 1 is the best and 133 is the worst. Early season caveats about SP+ are also in order.
COMPARING AP, COACHES, AND SP+
Holy shit, Colorado. Are the AP and Coaches overreacting to that win over TCU? Is SP+ slow to catch up? Maybe both? This is one that I’m sure that many of us will be keeping an eye on.
SP OVERALL, OFFENSE, AND DEFENSE
OSU’s offense fell back a few places from #1 last week which we probably all anticipated. But they actually moved up to the #5 defense (#10 last week). After beating Indiana?
And come on, USC. Can you at least try on defense?
Here’s the same graph with only B1G schools and Michigan’s OOC opponents.
Um, Northwestern?
LARGEST MOVES IN SP+ RANKINGS
In case anyone is interested, here are the top-10 increases and decreases in the SP+. There’s a surprising number of SEC teams in that right-hand side graph.
SP OFFENSE AND DEFENSE (RAW SP+ SCORES)
After a comment last week, I reversed the raw defense scores so this graph can be interpreted in the standard way. You want to be in the top-right quadrant. You do not want to be in the bottom-left quadrant.
I like where Michigan’s sitting. Some pretty good company.
SP RANKINGS BY CONFERENCE (RAW SP+ SCORES)
The last graph breaks down the raw SP+ scores by conference and team. The horizontal lines are the mean SP+ scores for the entire conference.
Thanks for looking. Anything you find interesting?
Go Blue!
September 6th, 2023 at 10:05 AM ^
Love these graphics.
While we're going to have a good year, the national title still may go through Bama/Georgia/FSU(?) so it ain't gonna be easy.
I think OSU will lose to Notre Dame and maybe one other Big Ten game before playing us; weird to see them without a star QB. That used to be common, weirdly!
September 6th, 2023 at 10:11 AM ^
QB for OSU, I expect, will improve as the season goes on. Ryan Day I think should get the benefit of the doubt at that position. Offensive Line (especially if there are injuries) is a place where OSU should be deeply concerned. I don't know if that unit can get right this season.
September 6th, 2023 at 10:17 AM ^
Ryan Day started on 3rd.
September 6th, 2023 at 1:43 PM ^
Ryan "Cooper" Day was born on second and was sent to third after a balk was called.
September 6th, 2023 at 8:43 PM ^
This is a very unfair comparison.
Cooper didnt have 2 - 20pt+ losses to Michigan until his 6th season.
September 6th, 2023 at 2:10 PM ^
It was a conference road game in his first ever start. McCord will almost certainly be good. The offensive line is the real big worry for that team
September 6th, 2023 at 8:06 PM ^
McCord is going to look better/good over the next two games. Then, he'll start on the road against ND and he'll stink. He'll get benched mid-game in favor of Brown. Brown will be the starter the rest of the season.
September 6th, 2023 at 1:44 PM ^
Way too early to write OSU off, especially their QB situation. I recall Justin Fields supposedly looked awful in his first spring game and then he turned into a world-beater. I'm giving OSU the benefit of the doubt because they seem to always figure their issues out before crunch time. They've lost early season games before (2014 Virginia Tech, 2017 Oklahoma, 2021 Oregon), looked really sluggish in others, and then they seem to always round to form by late October / early November.
But I do believe that the road to a national championship still goes through the SEC, or at least through Georgia, anyway. They've earned that after back-to-back titles, and as far as I'm concerned, they deserve to be #1 until someone beats them. If Michigan wants to win it all, they are going to have to beat at least one SEC team in the CFP. Its possible they'll have to beat two.
September 6th, 2023 at 4:18 PM ^
I think OSU will lose to Notre Dame and maybe one other Big Ten game before playing us; weird to see them without a star QB.
I wouldn't worry about them too much. I caught this briefly on Saturday: Rick Neuheisel actually listed Devin Brown as his dark-horse Heisman candidate, proving the adage that the backup QB is the most popular guy on the team.
September 6th, 2023 at 7:27 PM ^
The Heisman isn't (usually) a popularity contest. I'll take the field against Brown.
September 6th, 2023 at 10:20 AM ^
I think the Colorado story will be interesting to see play out. TCU might just suck or......Coach Sanders may have figured out how to staple together a competitive team from the portal.
September 6th, 2023 at 10:28 AM ^
Could be both.
I wonder what the worst drop-off was for a team that played in an actual or de facto championship game the previous season? Lot of "worst-to-first" lists out there, but nothing describing the opposite.
September 6th, 2023 at 11:34 AM ^
Off the top of my head, the LSU Tigers won it in 2019, went 5-5 in the Covid year and then fired Coach O in 2021 after going 6-6 (before the bowl game). That's definitely the worst performance by a CFP finalist.
BCS era I'm sure there were some duds the year after going to the title game, but I'd have to look it up. Thinking VT fell off the year after playing FSU in the title, and Nebraska the year after Miami. But can't remember, and VT was pretty good in the '00s even if they had one bad year here or there. Nebraska eventually fell very hard, but I don't remember how fast it was.
September 6th, 2023 at 11:51 AM ^
In 2013 ND went 0-4...with the rest of their wins vacated...
September 6th, 2023 at 12:10 PM ^
Yea, sure but that's silly. Hate for ND and all that but blergh they finished ranked the NCAA is silly.
September 6th, 2023 at 12:09 PM ^
Was wrong about VT - they finished in the top 10 the next year. Nebraska finished 7-7 - which not sure why they got 13 regular season games, for some reason I thought everyone played 11 back when and they didn't play Hawai'i or make the B12 title game.
The 2010 Texas Longhorns fell to 5-7, a year removed from Colt McCoy leading them to the national title game. Most other teams though finished ranked - I think other than the ones mentioned only one other finished unranked, and quite a few followed it up with another top 10 campaign. This holds true in the Bowl Coalition and Alliance days - in fact, when a B10/P10 team was in the national title chase to the end ('94 PSU, '96 ASU, '97 M), not only did they follow that season up with a ranked showing, their opponents in the Rose Bowl did as well - with the exception of the '98 Wazzu Cougars. So technically, they could be included as one of the worst teams to follow up the season after playing in a national championship game - but they weren't a finalist, they weren't playing for the national championship themself. So the answer has to be the 2010 Longhorns, with dishonorable mentions to the 2020 and 2021 LSU Tigers, as well as the 2002 Nebraska Cornhuskers (although the latter shouldn't have even been IN the national title in 2001 game after getting stomped by a Colorado who then got stomped by the REAL #2, Oregon. But I digress).
September 6th, 2023 at 11:45 AM ^
Color me skeptical. Let's let the season play out and maybe even see what he does next year.
September 6th, 2023 at 1:08 PM ^
I think its pretty obvious that TCU's defense will be an anchor. Their offense is still pretty good. A middling season for them. I think Colorado will be up and down, which certainly is better than being 1-11. Prime can coach.
September 6th, 2023 at 1:53 PM ^
Like most things in life, I think the answer here lies somewhere in between.
Deion injected quite a bit of talent into the Colorado program in the offseason, and also got rid of what he considered to be a lot of "dead weight" in the program. Brought in guys who he knew could buy into what he wanted to do and play the game the way he wanted them to play, with the same kind of attitude, so he deserves praise for that. But I don't think that alone is what allowed him to beat TCU.
TCU last year was, for all intents and purposes, the Bizarro World version of Scott Frost's Nebraska. If you found them in a close game, they were going to find a way to win it. They never looked overly convincing against anyone, but instead of sharting themselves and finding a way to lose every week, they found a way to win. Their wins were usually ugly, but they were wins and that was all that mattered. Like Nebraska, they took everything about "reverting to the law of averages" and threw it into a wood-chipper. They were just on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, but much of the engine that made that go (between Duggan, Miller and Johnston) is gone now, so its possible that we are seeing a hard regression to the mean with TCU, and we're beginning to see this year what they possibly should've been last year.
The TL;DR version of what I'm saying? I think both things of what you said can be true.
September 6th, 2023 at 10:27 AM ^
Connelly says it will take at least a few weeks for Colorado's ranking to make sense. It's still factoring in their season last year and isn't giving them enough weight for positive personnel changes.
September 6th, 2023 at 10:32 AM ^
Love this, thank you!!
Still rooting for Cade but, damn, if not during the noncon with Cade+All, then how will Iowa ever graduate from being the archetypal member of the lower right quadrant? That expresses the recent diminishment of their OL as much as a real-time viewing.
Didn’t expect ECU behind UNLV here. If the opponent offense increments up (which I didn’t foresee), I’m really hoping we have most of our starting secondary back. (Not because I’m nervous but because I’m excited.)
September 6th, 2023 at 10:32 AM ^
Ohio State's defensive numbers were incredible against Indiana. They allowed only 2.8 yards per play. Michigan has only done better than that in one game over the last 2+ years: UConn last year.
Plenty of caveats apply (and OSU's problem hasn't been that they can't shut down poor offenses) but it's a great start for them.
September 6th, 2023 at 1:21 PM ^
I only watched the highlights, but in the past OSU has been reluctant to pull their starters. I’d be surprised if they utilize depth the way we do. Day seems to be almost too aware of stats and metrics.
September 6th, 2023 at 4:54 PM ^
Ohio State under Day absolutely goes for style points at the expense of rotating his younger guys through, like Harbaugh has done for most of his tenure. When Michigan nears a 30 point lead, it's almost automatically backup time. I don't remember the exact number, but Kyle McCord had a ridiculously low number of snaps last season despite how many blowouts Ohio State played in. Compare that to how often McCarthy played in 2021, or Drew Allar last year (I believe he got snaps in almost every single game). I think that's a big reason why McCord isn't as far along as they hoped he would be. They were too busy stad-padding Stroud's numbers in a futile Heisman campaign to get their next starter enough reps to be confident this year
September 6th, 2023 at 7:59 PM ^
OSU does this and so does MSU to an extent. MSU was up 31-7 and still had Noah Kim out there as well as Nathan Carter. Kim's been on campus for going into his 4th season and had 19 pass attempts going into the season. And yeah, OSU would trot out these guys trying to win them a Heisman and just assuming the guy behind him will be a stud from day 1.
I suspect McCord will improve as the season progresses but he's not preternaturally accurate like Stroud and he wasn't given any benefit by at least getting reps last year.
September 6th, 2023 at 2:06 PM ^
True, but Michigan held both Nebraska and IU to 3.0 ypp last year, for example, and UM did it while facing 74 plays from the Hoosiers last year vs. the 54 the Buckeyes saw this season.
It was a good performance by OSU but they also held Iowa to 2.7 ypp last year...and then gave up 8.8 and 8.9 ypp, respectively, to UM and Georgia. By comparison, UM's absolutely awful defensive performance against TCU was "only" 7 ypp. They seem like a defense that can squeeze bad offenses to death but the jury is still out if they're going to hold up any better against teams that actually know how to run an offense.
September 6th, 2023 at 10:56 AM ^
Of all this data, I thought it interesting that Louisville won and still dropped 15 points in SP+. I don't really know enough about the SP+ metric but given that all the other big droppers lost and mostly looked pretty bad doing so probably isn't a great sign for Louisville.
September 6th, 2023 at 2:01 PM ^
I think the big thing that got Louisville was that they gave up over 300 yards passing to a previously-bad GT passing attack (it's a new QB so maybe that's unfair) and didn't really do a lot defensively beyond get a couple of timely turnovers. GT is better than they were last season but it's still not great for the Cards to be in a close fight with a team that came into the year 75th in SP+, only a bit above ECU.
September 6th, 2023 at 11:09 AM ^
I think comparing this year's and last year's out-of-conference games is a bit of a disservice to this year's team. Yes, both schedules are bad/easy, but last year's had 3 of the bottom 10 teams in SP+. ECU and (apparently) UNLV are not great, but there is a huge difference in being ranked in the 130s vs 90 to 100 (BGSU caveats aside). Yes, UM should handle these teams, but they should not be the same type of pushovers that last year's team played. I think we saw this with ECU. They looked like a well-coached team that was just short on talent. I guess my point is, I think we should be able to infer more about wins against this schedule than last year's.
September 6th, 2023 at 11:31 AM ^
any rankings that have OSU's O over ours is clearly flawed at this point. JJ and Co. did everything that they wanted to do on Saturday sans the goal line dives with Edwards. Day was so fucking frustrated by his O vs IU that he actually tough guy passed up a medium FG late on 4th down to then give up and take it a few plays later.
September 6th, 2023 at 12:05 PM ^
It is heavily biased by preseason expectations. If those trends hold, Michigan will have the higher ranked offense as the preseason weighting fades away.
September 7th, 2023 at 6:25 AM ^
Isn't it also still factoring in last season, for now?
September 6th, 2023 at 12:20 PM ^
Is SEC really that great?
September 6th, 2023 at 1:34 PM ^
Big 3, Little 11.
September 6th, 2023 at 1:50 PM ^
Its 1 game for everyone, lets all just hold for a sec shall we?
September 6th, 2023 at 4:25 PM ^
Cade bringing up the rear!
September 6th, 2023 at 5:07 PM ^
It's interesting that in the SP+ 4-quadrant grid, the PAC12 -> B1G teams occupy a quadrant that no B1G teams do.
Those teams should provide a different brand of football than we've been used to seeing
September 6th, 2023 at 6:06 PM ^
I'm sure USC will always have a high-powered offense with Riley in charge, but I'm wondering how Oregon and Washington are going to be when Nix and Penix are gone.
But these teams will definitely bring some variation to the B1G. I'm looking forward to seeing how they adapt to the B1G style of play and/or how the B1G teams adapt to these offensive systems.
September 7th, 2023 at 2:53 PM ^
I think Oregon will be ok but Washington will come back to earth. Not that I believe Sparty is good in any way but, that game should be closer than last years. Or Washington could just pave them and all will be right with the world.
September 7th, 2023 at 5:31 AM ^
Can someone give me the “I’m a dumb ass” version of all this?
September 7th, 2023 at 11:53 AM ^
Michigan is good on both offense and defense. So are Bama, Georgia, and OSU. End of story. 😊
Honestly, though, the SP is heavily weighted right now by things like returning production. Once more games are played, they get a heavier weight in the calculations and a true picture of the teams will start to emerge.
I also think it's also fun to look at how teams compare on both sides of the ball. Look at USC, for example, and how good their offense is compared to their defense. Also, the B1G has 10 teams in the top 30 on defense, but only 3 on offense. The new members from the Pac are almost the exact opposite.
September 7th, 2023 at 2:55 PM ^
Much appreciated! When I see graphs like that I have flashbacks of renewing my license at the BMV when I forgot my glasses.