SEC Power Rankings following Week 1 of 2018 season

Following the first week of the 2018 college football seasons, the top of our SEC Power Rankings is very different. But the bottom is mostly the same.

It’s safe to say Tennessee football didn’t do itself any favors following the first week of the 2018 season. But overall, the Southeastern Conference balled out. And that made things very difficult for our SEC Power Rankings.

After all, how do you decipher teams that you know are better but faced a lesser test? And what do you do about a team like the Vols, who were the only ones to suffer such a brutal fate Saturday but also suffered one that numerous others would have suffered had they faced the West Virginia Mountaineers? It’s very difficult, but it can make things easy.

As we get set to give you our first week of SEC Power Rankings, we’re throwing out all of our preseason criteria. This will not take into account who we project will be the better team overall. This is solely based on the sample size. And the sample size is one week.

As a result, we are going to heavily weight the quality of the opponent each team beat. Margin of victory will mostly be a tiebreaker but could also be a bigger factor if it is significant enough. It just depends on each game.

What’s clear is these rankings will dramatically change over the course of the next few weeks. We have only a limited amount of evidence right now for each team. And to be fair, all things being equal to the most extreme, there’s a slight case one or two teams could get a boost because of our preseason rankings.

So who’s the class of the conference after the first week of 2018? Which teams still have a heck of a lot to prove? It’s time to break all of that down here. These are our SEC Power Rankings following Week 1 of the college football season.