With no major upsets in Big 12 football in Week 5, our rankings remain pretty similar to last week. However, the middle class experiences another shift.
Welcome back to the Saturday Blitz weekly Big 12 power rankings! It was another exciting week in the Big 12 and in all of college football, and with several close games in the conference, we’ve got plenty to talk about in this week’s edition. After questioning both Texas and Texas Tech last week, we got some semblance of an answer on Saturday, as Texas Tech was beaten by West Virginia, and Texas held on to take care of Kansas State.
Both of those results, or at least the final scores, are somewhat deceptive though. Texas held Kansas State to just over 200 yards all game long, and led 19-0 at halftime. It wasn’t until the second half that they started struggling, and overall that 19-14 win felt much more like a definitive win watching the game than it did looking at the stats.
Tech’s situation is basically the opposite. They were dominated for the first three quarters, allowing 28 points in the first quarter and trailing 35-10 at halftime before coming back out and making the appropriate adjustments defensively. They slowed Will Grier down, and without Alan Bowman, they cut the lead down to eight with just under eight minutes to go in the game. They couldn’t capitalize though, and West Virginia did enough to pull away. Unlike Texas and their three good quarters, Texas Tech had one good quarter, and will be ranked accordingly.
There really wasn’t a ton else in the conference this week. Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and TCU all got the job done against underdogs, and while they all didn’t look great, they got the win, and that’s all that really matters.
At this point, I’ll do my weekly disclaimer. These rankings are reactive, not predictive. They become less reactive each week, because I have more information to go on, so the drastic jumps that happened in the early weeks of the season have all but stopped at this point. That means that this week’s rankings will look a lot like last week’s rankings. That will be true for the rest of the season, as we know more about these teams. Let’s get ranking!