College football conference rankings: Can Big Ten get teams in College Football Playoff?

The Big Ten is dominating the college football rankings, but is it possible they can get two teams in the College Football Playoff?

This week in college football didn’t see so many top teams fall by the wayside, but it did see plenty of upsets. The biggest came at the hands of the 2-3 Purdue Boilermakers. One week after the Iowa Hawkeyes showed they can score the offense to win a top matchup, they showed a comeback wasn’t in the cards against a much lesser opponent than Penn State. Spencer Petras had a dreadful day, throwing four interceptions. Iowa’s second-half possessions went punt-punt-turnover on downs-interception-interception and then the possession that ended the game. Dreadful.

While Iowa was the only top-ten team to lose this week, they were hardly the only upset on the weekend. In total, five ranked teams lost to unranked opponents. Two more ranked teams lost to other ranked teams. Every conference saw its share of losses, but the SEC saw two more teams fall out of the Top 25 rankings after both Florida and Arkansas lost. This impacted the SEC’s ability to move up the rankings this week despite dominant performances otherwise.

College football conference rankings entering Week 8: Big Ten strong

5. College football conference rankings: ACC

The ACC had a fun week. Clemson and Syracuse had a back-and-forth matchup (weird to say now, but it happened). Clemson now has the 26th highest vote totals in the AP rankings, so another win will put them back in the rankings. Miami and North Carolina quietly had one of the games of the year, ending with an interception with just six seconds left despite Miami being in field goal range to tie it. Despite the fun week, not enough happened to move up the rankings, but there were a lot of positives from this conference.

4. College football conference rankings: Pac-12

It was not a banner week from the Pac-12, but Oregon’s win on Friday to keep them hanging on to the top ten is enough to barely hold onto the number four spot. Arizona State got some hype, but then they lost to Utah. The hype was not real for the Sun Devils. UCLA did survive in Washington to keep its 5-2 record. The rest of the conference is a pretty sad state of affairs. These two conferences are in desperate need of some depth.