Wisconsin joins the top 3 in ESPN’s latest SP+ rankings

The offseason love for Paul Chryst and the Wisconsin Badgers was higher than in any year I can remember…

The offseason love for Paul Chryst and the Wisconsin Badgers was higher than in any year I can remember.

Yes, they landed at No. 12 in the preseason AP Poll which seems like a normal for the team. But ESPN’s advanced rating systems FPI and SP+ have seen them as one of the best in the nation, even though they’ve only played one game.

FPI–ESPN’s college football power index–currently has the Badgers as the No. 4 team in the nation and gives them a 40 percent chance to make the playoff and a 7.5 percent chance to end the season National Champions.

Related: A Nebraska radio station had an awful theory about why Saturday’s game was canceled

ESPN’s SP+ rankings, created by staff writer Bill Connelly, saw what happened with Clemson struggling to defeat Boston College and now has the Badgers as the third-best team in the nation. Yes, SP+ moved the 1-0 Badgers ahead of the 7-0 Clemson Tigers.

From the 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.”

The two teams still ahead of Wisconsin are Ohio State at No. 1 and Alabama at No. 2. I never thought I would say a sentence that included Ohio State, Alabama and Wisconsin as the top-3 teams in the nation.

Here is what Connelly had to say about the Badgers and their rest-of-season outlook:

“For all of this season, we have been able to count on two things regarding the SP+ rankings: Ohio State was going to be No. 1, and Alabama and Clemson were going to trade the No. 2 and 3 rankings back and forth.

Thanks to an extremely 2020 oddity, that trend finally changed. To be sure, Ohio State’s still No. 1 after handling a top-10 Penn State team with relative ease. But thanks to Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence-less struggle against Boston College, combined with Wisconsin’s canceled game against Nebraska — which meant the Badgers have still produced a single, nearly perfect data point for 2020 — the Tigers fell to fourth.”

 

The Badgers are scheduled to be back in action on Saturday against Purdue, though that game is still in question with Wisconsin continuing to announce more positive COVID-19 tests.

When they do return to the field all eyes will be trained on their performance, as across the Big Ten we’ve seen huge upsets, new programs in first place and overall pandemonium. If Wisconsin can bring the consistency they’re so well known for, the Big Ten West is theirs for the taking.

I won’t talk about the playoff just yet, but the path is there if the Badgers are able to return to the field at full strength sooner rather than later.