This post is an homage to OKC Dave and his deep bag of metrics and advanced stats. Bill C. posted the last five years’ worth of S&P+ ratings recently.
A refresher: S&P+ is a college football ratings system derived from the play-by-play and drive data of all 800+ of a season’s FBS college football games (and 140,000+ plays).
You can read more about how the ratings are calculated here. The short of it is that efficiency, explosiveness, field position and finishing drives are the main factors. It takes some of the randomness out of it and shows how goos you should have been in a given season (if every team had the same schedule).