Big Ten Power Rankings Week 8: Purdue and Maryland Rise, Northwestern Falls
After a terrible start to the season, the Big Ten isn’t looking so bad right now. There are a few very good teams that could make a case to be in the college football playoff hunt at the end of the year, four to be exact, and they could all make this playoff race very interesting. The conference hit us with quite a few duds on Saturday, but we still were able to find out a lot about many of the teams, even with four of them on a bye week.
Maryland showed us where they might belong, Minnesota is hanging on as a team technically in the playoff race, and Ohio State, Nebraska, and Michigan State all look great. We have some teams we thought belonged at the bottom as well making a case to move up this list.
More from Big Ten
- Michigan State vs. Maryland: Location, time, prediction, and more
- Wisconsin vs. Purdue: How to watch, odds, injuries, weather, and history
- College Football Playoff: Projected top 4 after Week 3
- Biggest winners and losers from College Football Week 3
- Ohio State football: 3 takeaways from win over Western Kentucky
In short, there are quite a few teams that are looking pretty decent right now in the Big Ten, and it has made these power rankings a little bit harder to do than we would have thought earlier in the year. There are 13 teams out of 14 that are reasonably thinking about a bowl game, three reasonably thinking about a spot in the college football playoff, and another one on the brink of thinking about that.
It makes for an exciting conference with quite a few good teams. So here are our Big Ten Power Rankings for Week 8 of the college football season.