Conference Power Rankings: Big Ten Better than Expected in Week 1
The Saturday Blitz Conference Power Rankings for Week One has turned out a few surprises.
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While some of the top conferences lived up to expectations, a few of them surprised us. The first week is always the easiest and the hardest week to do out of conference rankings. It is easy because so many teams play non-conference games, so we can measure them against other conferences instead of their own conference. It’s hard because most of those games are against low-level FBS and FCS schools.
So as we did these rankings we had to factor in lots of things. How many teams from top conferences played teams from other top conferences? How did each conference fare in the biggest non-conference games of the week? Were there any bad losses by good teams in the conference to low-level teams? When you take all that into account, there is a shake-up in the Power Five rankings that would not have been expected.
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With the First Pick
But the shake-up isn’t only in the Power Five. The non-Power Five conferences also showed what they can do. As we looked at those conferences, we took into account the match-ups against other non-Power Five conferences, how they fared against teams from Power Five conferences, and if there were any bad FCS losses. The results will surprise you as much as the Power Five rankings did. Perhaps some conferences aren’t as close to being Power Five conferences as we thought.
Others have shown they might be the one to have on automatic bid in one of the elite six bowl games. Again, this is all early speculation after one week, but who doesn’t have fun talking about it? So here are our objective conference power rankings for the first week of college football.