Well, here's their methodology.....
"• The previous year’s EPA generally matters more than EPA from the prior years, though sometimes the most recent year matters less if the team’s head coach or several starters on that side of the ball are not returning.
• That said, performance from years prior to the most recent one still does have a significant effect. A college football team plays only a dozen or so games in a season, so having additional data from prior years, even if it matters less than information from the most recent year, helps make the ratings more accurate.
• Having more returning starters helps on both sides of the ball, sometimes even if the team wasn’t that good the previous year. A returning starting quarterback helps the most, accounting for a boost of more than three points of offensive EPA per game versus having a new starter (all else equal).
• The presence of a new head coach generally decreases correlation between the previous season and the coming one (relative to returning the same head coach), which intuitively makes sense. A new head coach hurts a team’s projection if it was good in one of the components (offense, defense, special teams) the prior season, but it can help the projection if it was poor in those aspects.
• Recruiting rankings, not just from the most recent class but over the previous couple, are definitely helpful in predicting offensive and defensive performance. There isn’t a big difference at all between having the 12th-ranked and 15th-ranked recruiting classes, but the difference between the 12th-ranked one and the 80th-ranked one can be substantial. We used a survey of various recruiting ranks to avoid being reliant on any single rank. Special thanks to Phil Steele for providing us information on returning starters and head coaches for 2014 and historical seasons.
From a big picture perspective, the method behind these rankings is fairly similar to how a knowledgeable writer might go about constructing his or her own top 25: look at which teams were successful last season or have been good over the past few years, account for what each team has coming back, and assess teams’ recruiting classes over the past couple of seasons."
I would say, outside of the fact that Nebraska beat them last year and they had a rough year, by that rubric, you can't get mad at Michigan being ranked ahead of Nebraska.
You can get mad and cry "OMG! Teh bias!" Or you can file this under another method of proof that things that being used to judge Nebraska's achievements, and I'm not saying it here but it commonly has a hashtag and rhymes with "Fine fins" don't hold much water outside of our fanbase.
