Nick Durand has been a Michigan football beat writer for Maize n Brew since 2023, covering games, press conferences and more.
The Michigan Wolverines now have three losses on their resume after falling to Illinois in a game that wasn't really as close as the 21-7 score indicated. After another backbreaking loss, the Wolverines are no longer a top-25 team, according to the AP or coaches polls, but they're still (somehow) in the good graces of Bill Connelly and ESPN's SP+ rankings.
Following the loss, the Wolverines are listed as the No. 24 team in the country, just a few notches down from where they were last week at No. 21. Michigan's SP+ rating is 11.4, meaning it should defeat the "average" college football team by 11.4 points.
Additionally, per SP+, Michigan has the No. 74 offense, No. 10 defense, and No. 18 special teams in the country.
For those of you unfamiliar with SP+, Connelly describes it as "a tempo and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency" that takes into account a team's efficiencies on offense, defense, and special teams. It uses these efficiencies to form one metric that can be used as an alternative method to rank college football teams. This metric can be used to predict how many points a given team should beat (or lose to) the "average" college football team by on a neutral field.
Michigan will welcome in Michigan State next Saturday for the annual battle for the Paul Bunyan Trophy. The Spartans are 4-3 and coming off a 32-20 victory over Iowa, but are ranked as the No. 72 team in the country by SP+. Michigan State's rating of 0.6 indicates the Wolverines should win the game by about 10 points, but as we've seen in recent weeks, anything is possible with this Michigan team.
We'll have to wait and see what the result will be when Michigan and Michigan State take the field at the Big House on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.