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Big 12 Football 2018: Usual suspects top Week 1 Power Rankings

By Patrick Mayhorn

ARLINGTON, TX - DECEMBER 2: The Oklahoma Sooners take the field before playing the TCU Horned Frogs during the first half at AT&T Stadium on December 2, 2017 in Arlington, Texas. OU won 41-17. (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)
ARLINGTON, TX - DECEMBER 2: The Oklahoma Sooners take the field before playing the TCU Horned Frogs during the first half at AT&T Stadium on December 2, 2017 in Arlington, Texas. OU won 41-17. (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images) /
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(Photo by John Weast/Getty Images)
(Photo by John Weast/Getty Images) /

To say that I’m not very confident in Kliff Kingsbury at this point would be an understatement. The former Red Raiders quarterback in entering his sixth season as the head coach in Lubbock, and after an 8-5 start in 2013, he’s managed to carve out an impressive niche of losing seven games and somehow keeping his job.

After a 5-7 year in 2016, the Red Raiders, in what seemed like a make or break year for Kingsbury, impressed the higher-ups at Texas Tech enough to give the head coach one more year as they took a huge step forward, winning exactly one more game than they did in 2016, while losing to every good team on their schedule. Texas Tech had three wins over teams that won more than 50% of their games last year, and all three went 7-6. Pretty great stuff.

Maybe 2018 will be different though! The Red Raiders return a ton of players from a defense that was actually not awful last year, and they looked pretty good early on in 2017, before collapsing when they started playing decent teams (I’m really trying to not be mean here, but they make it hard). All of this means that Texas Tech’s defense should be good, and if they can beat Ole Miss in week one, it’ll probably drum up some excitement. I wouldn’t bank on that though.

This is the part of the conference where everything becomes very difficult to predict. I’m pretty confident in my bottom three, and I’m pretty confident in my top two. However, I could be talked into any of the next five teams landing anywhere from three to seven. I like Iowa State a lot this year, but as the least established program in that group, I have to put them here.

They return just 12 starters (six on each side of the ball), but those starters are very good. Kyle Kempt has a pretty low ceiling, but he looks like a great game manager and a quarterback that can, above all else, avoid mistakes and make the right plays. Running back David Montgomery is awesome, and will probably need to lead the offense, because I’m not super comfortable with the receivers or the pass blocking.

I’m also a little iffy on the defense. There are some excellent players on it, like Ray Lima and Brian Peavy, but nearly half of the starters being new, in such an offense-heavy conference, makes me nervous. With all that being said, I think Iowa State will probably do what most of the middle-class teams in the Big 12 will do: win anywhere from three to five conference games, sweep their non-conference, and make a decent bowl.

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