Big Ten Football Rankings Week 4 ESPN SP+: Michigan No. 1 in Country

Following a Week 4 slate that saw several Big Ten football teams pull off huge wins, while others had catastrophic meltdowns, here is where each of the 14 teams ranks in SP+, the best all-in-one advanced metric in college football.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Ranking college football teams in a perfectly accurate manner is an impossible task. Human error comes into account whenever people try to do it, and one need only look at old BCS polls to know that the computers can get it wrong too.

Even though there will never be a perfect method for college football rankings, there is one system that does it better than all others, in my opinion — SP+.

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 4's games.

Big Ten SP+ Rankings

1. Michigan (26.7 rating, 1st overall in FBS)
2. Ohio State (25.4 rating, 3rd overall in FBS)
3. Penn State (21.6 rating, 10th overall in FBS)
4. Wisconsin (13.1 rating, 27th overall in FBS)
5. Maryland (11.9 rating, 33rd overall in FBS)
6. Iowa (7.1 rating, 39th overall in FBS)
7. Illinois (3.8 rating, 52nd overall in FBS)
8. Minnesota (3.1 rating, 54th overall in FBS)
9. Nebraska (1.9 rating, 59th overall in FBS)
10. Michigan State (1.6 rating, 63rd overall in FBS)
11. Rutgers (0.2 rating, 69th overall in FBS)
12. Purdue (-3.3 rating, 77th overall in FBS)
13. Indiana (-6.9 rating, 85th overall in FBS)
14. Northwestern (-9.1 rating, 93rd overall in FBS)

Though Ohio State had the biggest win of the season on Saturday, it was the Buckeyes' arch rivals who vaulted over both them and Georgia to claim the top spot in SP+. Michigan cruised to a 31-7 win over Rutgers on Saturday, and have yet to have been seriously challenged by any of the teams on its schedule. 

Other teams that took major losses in Week 4 — most notably Iowa and Michigan State — saw massive tumbles down the SP+ rankings. 

If one wanted to make Big Ten conference tiers from these rankings, it's fairly easy to do so:

Tier 1 — The True Contenders

• Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State

Tier 2 — Teams that are Pretty Good

• Wisconsin, Maryland, Iowa

Tier 3 — Teams that are Middling to Bad

• Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Michigan State, Rutgers

Tier 4 — Really Bad

• Purdue, Indiana, Northwestern

Related Stories on Big Ten:

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• ROBBIE HUMMEL LEAVING ESPN: The former Purdue Boilermaker and beloved college basketball color commentator is leaving ESPN to call Big Ten games for NBC and Fox this season. CLICK HERE
• WEEK 4 BIG TEN POWER RANKINGS: With one-third of the 2023 college football season concluded, the Big Ten conference has clearly separated into two groups of teams — the five that are definitively good and capable of winning a lot of games, and the other nine that have major, major problems. CLICK HERE
• WEEK 4 BIG TEN FOOTBALL RECAP: It was one of the craziest Saturday nights that the sport has ever seen, from Ohio State's miraculous win over Notre Dame in South Bend, to Northwestern coming back from down 21 to beat Minnesota in overtime. Here is everything that happened in the Big Ten. CLICK HERE