The Pac-12 is getting dangerously close to the bottom as the SEC continues to dominate in our college football conference power rankings for Week 7.
Upsets were in high order this past week in the 2018 college football season. Of the 23 teams that were ranked in the top 25 coming into Week 6 that played on Saturday, seven of them suffered an upset loss. What’s more, five of those seven teams that lost on Saturday did so against unranked opponents. It was a week that has already shaken up the college football world and will likely continue to do so.
To make this past week seem even more off the rails, the upsets that actually transpired don’t even take into account the fact that other ranked teams throughout the country were certainly in danger of going down. The Washington Huskies had to hold off an unlikely UCLA Bruins comeback, the Miami Hurricanes just narrowly got past the Florida State Seminoles and two unbeaten in the Colorado Buffaloes and NC State Wolfpack had to grind out wins to stay perfect.
Heading into Week 7, the landscape of college football has indeed changed a great deal. Potential contenders to make the Playoff appear less likely now while teams like the Texas Longhorns are trying to make a case that they should be in the conversation.
Despite all of this calamity, however, when you look at the Power 5 conferences as a whole, not much has changed all that much. You might think differently about each of these conferences and how they shake out individually, but in comparison to one another, things ultimately haven’t changed just yet.
With that in mind, let’s get into the college football conference power rankings for Week 7, stacking the Power 5 conferences up against one another.
For their part, the Clemson Tigers put forth their best effort to prove that they are indeed one of the best teams in college football after many started to question that following their Week 5 escape from the Syracuse Orange. Dabo Swinney’s crew came out and lit up the Wake Forest Demon Deacons to the tune of a 63-3 victory. That works in the favor of the ACC as, at the very least, this conference does seem to have one of the few elite teams in the country.
Unfortunately for the rest of the ACC, there was really only one other game this week that would inspire any kind of confidence in the strength of the conference as a whole. That game, of course, featured the still-unbeaten NC State Wolfpack maintaining their perfect record with a win over a good Boston College Eagles team. Outside of that, however, it’s right to question what the ACC truly is this season.
Around the rest of the conference, the Virginia Tech Hokies crashed back down to Earth as they were annihilated by Notre Dame. Meanwhile, the Miami Hurricanes truthfully should have lost to the Florida State Seminoles, a team that has been the butt of many jokes for their haplessness this season. And if that weren’t enough, the fiery Syracuse team that almost upset Clemson followed that up with an overtime loss to an extremely inconsistent Pitt Panthers team.
The point of all of this is that the ACC has an elite team in Clemson and a seemingly very good team in NC State. Having said that, it’s hard to say that there are honestly any other “good” teams in this conference, which is a tough look that keeps them at the bottom of these power rankings.