The first week of the 2018 college football season is in the books, so how do the Power 5 conferences stack up in our power rankings for Week 2?
If there’s one lesson that you can take away from Week 1 of virtually every college football season, it’s this: Take everything that you thought you knew and promptly throw it out the window. When the pads go on and the ball is kicked off, everything that we saw on paper coming into the year changes. As they say, the games aren’t played on paper, and that was certainly evident when it came to Week 1 of the season.
One of the more interesting debates to have every season is in regards to conference supremacy. It’s pretty widely accepted — though still argued over — that the SEC is the “best” conference in college football. However, the intriguing matter entering 2018 was over whether or not they would be able to retain that title, largely because the Big Ten is/was expected to be incredibly deep this season.
When you’re assessing the Power 5 conferences, you’re always going to have highly ranked teams that color the conversation. And, in truth, that plays a large part in comparing the conferences to one another. At the same time though, you also have to consider the depth and overall quality of each conference when making those same comparisons. Sure, a conference could have two top-10 teams, but if the other 10 teams in said conference are sub-.500, that’s not a great overall showing.
Thus, we’re going to make a weekly assessment of the Power 5 conferences in college football, stacking them up against one another — power rankings style. Let’s get this going with the lowest-ranked conference after Week 1 of the 2018 season.
Many things went according to plan for Pac-12 teams in the opening week of the 2018 college football season. The USC Trojans, led by freshman starting quarterback JT Daniels, ran away from UNLV to start the season. Meanwhile, the 24th ranked Oregon Ducks put on an explosive offensive performance to topple Bowling Green to begin the year.
Beyond that, there were other good, hard-fought wins throughout the Pac-12 in Week 1 of the season. The Stanford Cardinal may not have seen what they’d hoped for from Bryce Love, but still handled a talented San Diego State team as well. Meanwhile, the Cal Golden Bears notched a win over another Power 5 team (North Carolina) and Arizona State showed some real promise.
Why the Pac-12 brings up the rear in the college football conference power rankings, however, is due to two things — the performance of their “best” team and how potential sleepers fell flat. The first, of course, refers to the Washington Huskies. Ranked sixth in the preseason AP Top 25 poll, they came out against Auburn and looked completely overmatched. Yes, not having left tackle Trey Adams hurt a lot, but it didn’t appear that he would’ve made enough of a difference to get a win in this one for UW.
Then you have the UCLA Bruins and Arizona Wildcats. While both teams entered the season unranked, they had potential to break out with Chip Kelly coaching the former and Khalil Tate leading the latter. Instead, they suffered losses to Cincinnati and BYU, respectively. And win you consider that in correlation with Washington’s showing, it’s hard to feel great about the Pac-12 as a whole moving forward.