Where Each Big Ten Football Team Stands in Week 2 ESPN SP+ Rankings
BLOOMINGTON, Ind — Two weeks into the 2023 college football season, and the Big Ten is clearly still one of the best conferences around.
There's many ways this can be measured, but one method that I prefer is ESPN's SP+ rankings.
SP+ was created by college football writer Bill Connelly many years ago, then working for SB Nation, now for ESPN. There's a whole lot of complex math involved that someone smarter than me like Connelly could explain, but it essentially boils down to this paragraph he wrote in 2017.
"SP+ is presented in the form of an adjusted points per game figure," Connelly wrote, though at the time it was called S&P+. "For instance, if Team A's S&P+ rating is plus-19.0, that means [Team A] is 19 points better than the average college football team. If Team B's rating is minus-12.0, [Team B] is 12 points worse than average."
And put another way — SP+ basically attempts to predict that if all things were even, with both teams playing on a neutral field with neutral conditions, who would be the expected winner.
Here's where all 14 Big Ten football teams rank in SP+, both nationally and relative to the rest of the conference, following Week 2's games.
Big Ten SP+ Rankings
- Ohio State (28.6 rating, 2nd overall in FBS)
- Michigan (27.7 rating, 3rd overall in FBS)
- Penn State (27.1 rating, 4th overall in FBS)
- Wisconsin (12.4 rating, 29th overall in FBS)
- Iowa (11.9 rating, 32nd overall in FBS)
- Maryland (11.6 rating, 34th overall in FBS)
- Michigan State (11.1 rating, 37th overall in FBS)
- Minnesota (9.8 rating, 42nd overall in FBS)
- Illinois (5.2 rating, 52nd overall in FBS)
- Rutgers (2.8 rating, 59th overall in FBS)
- Purdue (1.8 rating, 61st overall in FBS)
- Nebraska (-1.7 rating, 72nd overall in FBS)
- Indiana (-3.2 rating, 79th overall in FBS)
- Northwestern (-4.2 rating, 81st overall in FBS)
Most fans wouldn't put Ohio State above Michigan or even Penn State after how lackluster the Buckeyes looked in their first two games of the season. But, SP+ still loves Ryan Day's team, likely due to Ohio State's offenses of the past being so reliably good (SP+ takes recent history into account in its rating).
From there, the metric clearly separates into three more tiers. In the "pretty good, but not great FBS and Power 5 teams" group is Wisconsin, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan State and Minnesota.
In tier three are slightly below average Power 5 squads, but still in the top half of FBS as a whole, in Illinois, Rutgers and Purdue.
And then we get the three teams in the negatives for their adjusted points figures, i.e. teams that SP+ finds to be in college football's bottom 66 teams rather than in its top 67. They are, quite clearly, Nebraska, Indiana and Northwestern.
All three of those teams are rated far and above the worst team in Power 5, though. Stanford is all the way down at No. 98 overall in SP+, ranked below UNLV and just ahead of Buffalo.
Related Stories on Big Ten Football:
- IU USED WRONG PROCESS TO MAKE RIGHT CHOICE AT QB: Indiana named Tayven Jackson as its starting quarterback, and that was probably the correct decision. But the process coach Tom Allen took to reach that decision — using a run-heavy approach vs Ohio State, and playing both quarterbacks against a bad FCS team — was flawed. CLICK HERE
- WEEK 2 BIG TEN POWER RANKINGS: Michigan's grip on the top spot in the conference has only tightened, while Wisconsin went flying out of the top five following a loss to Washington State. CLICK HERE
- MEL TUCKER UNDER INVESTIGATION: News broke on Sunday morning that the football coach of the Michigan State Spartans is under investigation for sexual harassment. CLICK HERE
- WOULD B1G EVER KICK A TEAM OUT OF CONFERENCE: With Stanford, Cal and SMU joining the ACC in 2024, conference realignment has truly gotten out of hand. With all the movement up into new conferences coming, we ask the question — would the Big Ten ever forcibly remove a team from its own conference? CLICK HERE