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Big 12 Football 2018: Cowboys rise, Frogs dip in Week 9 power rankings

By Patrick Mayhorn

STILLWATER, OK - OCTOBER 27: Quarterback Taylor Cornelius #14 of the Oklahoma State Cowboys dives across the pylon to score the game-winning touchdown against linebacker Gary Johnson #33 of the Texas Longhorns late in the fourth quarter on October 27, 2018 at Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Oklahoma State won 38-35. (Photo by Brian Bahr/Getty Images)
STILLWATER, OK - OCTOBER 27: Quarterback Taylor Cornelius #14 of the Oklahoma State Cowboys dives across the pylon to score the game-winning touchdown against linebacker Gary Johnson #33 of the Texas Longhorns late in the fourth quarter on October 27, 2018 at Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Oklahoma State won 38-35. (Photo by Brian Bahr/Getty Images) /
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With Texas falling, Kansas winning, Oklahoma and West Virginia rolling, and Iowa State looking awesome again, Big 12 football continues to be exciting.

Welcome back to yet another Big 12 power rankings! We’re headed into November, which means the best part of college football is still ahead of us. The final stretch is packed with great games, great plays, and of course, heated conference races. As teams all over the country emerge as real contenders for their conference (and for the playoff), the Big 12 does the same, with a few teams really showing their true forms this past weekend.

That can obviously be taken in quite a few ways. The biggest game of the weekend was certainly Texas-Oklahoma State, which probably revealed more about Texas than it did Oklahoma State, but other games, like West Virginia crushing Baylor, Iowa State outlasting Texas Tech, and of course, the terrible crimes TCU committed on their way to a loss to Kansas.

All of that action also makes my job easier. The Big 12 has more parity than any other conference in college football, and that was proved once again this weekend. However, this was not a week with games so massive that they cause conference-wide shifts. No, this was a great week to help sort out where teams belong in their half of the conference. I’ve said before that this conference has five good teams and five bad teams, and I think those five stayed the same this week, which makes things easy.

What we did learn, at least a bit, is where those teams fit in their groups. We learned that Oklahoma State probably deserves to be a bit closer to five, while TCU should drop back to the back. We learned that Oklahoma is still the class of the conference, and Texas still isn’t back. We learned that Iowa State is just as legitimate as we thought, and should be considered a contender for the rest of the year.

Before we jump into these rankings, I’ll remind you that these rankings are reactive, and not predictive. If you want my predictions, you should check out last week’s rankings, in which I predicted each team’s finish in conference play.

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