Big 12 Football 2018: Pokes make push for top spot

Big 12 football had a big chance to make a statement in Week 3, and while TCU couldn’t beat Ohio State, it was a still a good week for the conference.

After a pretty brutal start to the season that saw the Big 12 struggling to take advantage of chances, falling more often than not to the top teams on their schedule. This Saturday, however, the script flipped, as the Big 12 managed to win all but two of their nonconference games, including a ranked win against Boise State.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten had a whopping seven losses to unranked foes, the Pac-12 saw USC, UCLA and Arizona State take bad losses, and an SEC team got absolutely crushed by North Texas. While the marquee matchup up the week in Arlington didn’t go TCU’s way, as they fell to an excellent Ohio State team, their ability to keep up was still encouraging.

Throw in Kansas demolishing a power five team (what), Kansas State getting back on track against a bad UTSA team, and Texas Tech winning a shootout against one of the better group of five teams in Houston, and you’ve got what was pretty easily the best week thus far for the Big 12, on a national scale.

Unfortunately, because the Big 12 decided that they need to play nine conference games for some reason, this is basically the last week for the conference to make any noise before the members start playing each other every week. Those two national chances come for Iowa State and Oklahoma, who played each last week, against Akron and Army respectively.

Once we get into conference season, these rankings will start to look a lot more representative, because we’ll have a larger and more informative sample size. However, as of right now, we don’t have that. We have three games. That means, as per usual, these rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. They’re reactive, not predictive, and they really don’t mean a ton right now.

With no further disclaimers, let’s rank the Big 12 heading into Week 4.