Saturday Blitz Conference Power Rankings Week 3
4. Big 12
The Big 12 is looking better but not great. Obviously Oklahoma deserves credit for blowing out Tennessee, and Baylor continues to blow out its inferior competition, but what will put the Big 12 over the hump and move it up this list will be some of the other teams in the conference we thought were middle-of-the-pack.
Kansas State right now looks pretty good and has a great chance to make a statement this Thursday against Auburn. West Virginia, meanwhile, is looking better and better after playing Alabama close and beating Maryland in College Park. TCU’s blowout win over Minnesota was a great look, and it appears that Iowa State has improved since its FCS loss to open the season after a big upset win against Iowa this past weekend. Yes, the Big Ten is bad, but the Big 12 still deserves credit for pulling out those wins.
But it can’t move too far up the list. UCLA did defeat Texas, and Arkansas’s blowout of Texas Tech was an embarrassing look for the conference. This was a bottom SEC team that destroyed a middle of the pack Big 12 team, which looked bad for the conference.
The Big 12 has looked nice in some of its non-conference games, but it is still in the bottom half of the Power Five teams. Still, it’s much closer to the teams above it than it is to the Big Ten, which is just plain bad this year.