Big Ten Power Rankings Week 8: Purdue and Maryland Rise, Northwestern Falls
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Saturday Blitz Big Ten Power Rankings Week 8
Just as we thought, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights are a decent team who have been surprisingly good so far this year in their first Big Ten season under Kyle Flood, but there’s nothing too impressive about them. Losing to Penn State looks bad now, and the blowout loss to Ohio State showed that they are simply an above average team right now. But that’s still better than what many would have expected.
Gary Nova is still playing football at a very high level for this team, and if it continues, they have no reason to be nervous. The only major red flag, though, is that he wasn’t dominant against a weak Ohio State secondary. But he still wasn’t terrible, and this is a balanced team that should be pretty good the rest of the year.
With Nebraska and Wisconsin up next, this team is likely to wake up a little bit more to reality, but Indiana should at least guarantee this team 6 wins, and Wisconsin and Maryland are both winnable games. So this is still a team that could get to 7-5 or 8-4, even if it loses to Nebraska or Michigan State.
That’s not too bad given what we expected from them, but it’s not good enough for us to put them any higher on these rankings.