Big 12 Football Power Rankings, Week 10: Oklahoma, Iowa State upended

If Texas needs a bye this week, the Mountaineers needed it last week. After the Texas game, they looked out of gas against Iowa State and Oklahoma. Out of the frying pan into the fire, however. The Cyclones get Baylor on Halloween. There’s a lot to figure out in Morgantown as they hit the home stretch in the Big 12.

First, they need to figure out how to run the football. This might not be due to lack of talent in the backfield, but it could be their porous offensive line. They don’t do a bad job pass blocking, but they are averaging only 2.9 yards per rush as a team. They’ll have to pull some upsets to get six wins; they can’t do that without a run game.

The Jekyll and Hyde award in the Big 12 goes to the TCU Horned Frogs. Fresh off of two straight losses, they upset Texas in Fort Worth. Such is life starting a fairly raw freshman quarterback. It’s good they’ve settled on Max Duggan — not that the Big 12 power rankings have a preference.

Here at the headquarters somewhere between DKR and the Little Apple, we pride ourselves on being analysts with no bias. We are just glad they decided on one quarterback because platoons don’t work this side of Steve Spurrier. They’ll take more lumps this season with a young quarterback and no dynamic runner behind him; they’ll be better for it in the future.

We here at headquarters don’t like ties. We are all about innovation like Bob Stoops putting Josh Heupel in punt formation distance in the shotgun or Chris Ault pioneering the pistol formation at Nevada. The tie is an antiquated form of lazy booking in our view. However, there are so many teams playing at the same level a tie occurred.

The Kansas State upset of Oklahoma was a godsend to break the tie. It wasn’t the defense that stone-walled the offense in the third quarter of their game against the Sooners that was most surprising; it was the offense. The Wildcats have scored 97 points in four conference games this season and they scored 48 of those points against Oklahoma on Saturday. Oklahoma made that offense look like the 1998 Wildcats with Michael Bishop.

How does a team that averaged 16 points per game in conference play score 48 points. It’s obvious; play Kansas, right? They didn’t play Kansas yet? It was Oklahoma? The Sooners? Well in that case, I have no idea how Kansas State offense exploded all of a sudden.

On the subject of Week 9 tie breakers, the Oklahoma State Cowboys reminded everyone they still have the most dangerous trio in the conference as Spencer Sanders, Chuba Hubbard and Tylan Wallace all had big days as the Cowboys upset the Iowa State Cyclones on the road on Saturday. They turned over Brock Purdy three times to secure the win.

They also did something they hadn’t done in a while: they took care of the ball winning the turnover battle 3-1. Turnovers had been the demise of the Cowboys in their previous two losses. They have two winnable games sandwiched between two tough games as they have TCU next week and end the season with Bedlam. Between that, they have West Virginia and Kansas.