College football SP+ rankings after CFP championship game - ESPN

Despite losing to Michigan at the end of the regular season, Ohio State headed into the postseason ranked first in SP+. The Buckeyes gave no reason for that to change in the weeks that followed. Following the Buckeyes' 34-23 win over Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff National Championship — their fourth straight playoff win by double digits — they have officially finished the season atop the pile. Notre Dame's ranking slipped slightly, due primarily to a logjam of tightly packed teams ranked between fourth and eighth, but there's no question who the best team of the 2024 season was.

Below are this week's SP+ rankings. What is SP+? In a single sentence, it's a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. I created the system at Football Outsiders in 2008, and as my experience with both college football and its stats has grown, I have made quite a few tweaks to the system.

SP+ is indeed intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a résumé ranking that gives credit for big wins or particularly brave scheduling — no good predictive system is. It is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football. If you're lucky or unimpressive in a win, your rating will probably fall. If you're strong and unlucky in a loss, it will probably rise.

(Note: While preseason projections remain in the ratings at least a smidgen all season, I tweaked these year-end numbers to remove them a bit more. I felt that was warranted with the increased connectivity and game totals the expanded playoff gave us. But that resulted in some teams' ratings changing for reasons other than the title game result.)

Here are FBS' nine conferences, ranked by average year-end SP+. Again, with the