On Monday, Michigan finally exorcised its College Football Playoff demons by defeating Alabama in the Rose Bowl by a final score of 27-20. The win sets up what should be another excellent game in the National Championship against Washington. Despite the big win though, the Wolverines fell out of favor in the latest edition of ESPN and Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings.
For those of you who haven’t followed along this season and might be new to SP+, Connelly describes SP+ as, “a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency.” The metric takes into account a team’s efficiencies on offense, defense, and special teams and can be used as an alternative form of ranking college football teams by predicting how many points a given team will beat (or lose to) the “average” college football team by.