Adam Burke shares his weekly college football power ratings
The college football regular season will be more than halfway over when this week wraps up. This is Week 7 of 13, with Week 14 reserved for conference championship games. The only teams not past the midpoint of the season will be Army and Navy, who have Week 15 just for them with the annual rivalry game on December 9.
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This past week shed some light on the “who’s elite?” discussion that I’ve been having and many people have been having. The answers appear to be Georgia and Michigan, but the Wolverines have not been tested yet. Georgia finally got a test from Kentucky and it looked like two teams playing two different games of football. Maybe Oklahoma can be an elite team, but the Sooners did give up 527 yards to Texas and that game was very close to going a lot differently. Maybe Oregon or Washington are elite. We’ll find out this weekend.
This past week also shed some more light on how all the teams in the middle are hard to gauge. The spread of talent across the country is better than ever, but the coaching may be worse in terms of game and clock management. Inconsistency rules the roost for the vast majority of CFB teams, like this example of the “transitive property of college football”.
Miami (FL) beat Miami (OH) 38-3 in Week 1. The RedHawks just shut out Bowling Green 27-0 and held the Falcons to under 200 yards one week after BG went on the road and beat Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets just upset the Hurricanes this past weekend thanks to the now-viral coaching misstep from Mario Cristobal.
There are other examples, but this one seems to be the most entertaining at present. The hope would be that the cream rises to the top going forward and that might be something of a safe assumption because the nation’s better teams are usually the deeper teams and there are a lot of quarterback injuries and controversies out there, not to mention ongoing attrition in the trenches and at other positions. It’s no longer “early”, so we should start to see some more consistency, at least from the country’s better programs. That won’t be true of all of them.
Between my power ratings, the lines in the market, and power ratings from other people whose work I greatly respect, I think we’re all going through the same struggle to try and accurately rate what we’re seeing. I have some bigger discrepancies in my numbers here in Week 7 than I typically would at this time of the season, but that’s going to happen in a higher-variance environment like the 2023 college football season. I just hope to be right on more of them than not.
Here are my Week 7 College Football Power Ratings:
