AAC Football Power Rankings 2017: Houston rising in Week 3

Like Houston, we don’t have a ton of data on UCF at the moment. What we do have is encouraging: the Knights trounced FIU in their opener largely on the strength of their passing game, which is not a sentence that was often said about the Knights in Year One of McKenzie Milton under center. If Milton starts to click in Scott Frost’s up-tempo spread this season, this team could turn out to be really scary.

We’ve got to learn to stop doubting Navy. Every offseason, we go and write off the Midshipmen for something like “losing Keenan Reynolds” or “losing Will Worth” or “losing, like, 98 percent of their entire team,” and somehow Ken Niumatalolo finds a way to get back to nine or ten wins. When the heat death of the universe comes for us all, Navy’s third-string quarterback will still survive, and he will run for 150 yards and three touchdowns against it.

At any rate, the Midshipmen are the first AAC team to earn a conference win, fighting off a surprisingly scrappy Tulane squad to move to 2-0 on the season. Your move, Heat Death of the Universe.

It’s very, very difficult to pick a leader among the mess that is the top of the AAC right now, but the Cougars are as good a bet as anyone.

Next: College Football: Top 50 breakout candidates for 2017

A 19-16 win over Arizona isn’t terribly impressive if you think the Cats are the same team that went 3-9 last season. But it’s too early in the 2017 campaign to make such judgments, so let’s just give UH a high-five for scoring the conference’s first win over a Power Five program of the season, and be on our way. Kyle Allen was solid in his Coogs debut, and Ed Oliver may not be of this Earth.