The Tennessee Volunteers took a jump for the second time this year in our SEC Power Rankings following Week 11 of the 2018 college football season.
Talk about a crazy week. Last Saturday was supposed to make our SEC Power Rankings picture much clearer with every team from the conference playing another team from the conference. It was the only day all season that things would be like that.
Instead, it muddied the picture more than ever. Tennessee football contributed to such a move with its huge upset win, but the Vols aren’t the only team responsible for messing things up. This runs much deeper, and it involves all middle of the pack teams.
Our SEC Power Rankings following Week 11 of 2018 includes two teams in contention for the College Football Playoff, one of whom may still be the greatest of all time. It also includes a third team who is below that top two but clearly above everybody else.
We are also pretty set with our bottom three and the order they should go in. However, the eight teams in between those six are a complete cluster, and it’s impossible to know where everybody belongs. If you just go by standings, it’s a bit easier.
But power rankings weigh how you’re playing at a specific time. And that throws everything for a loop. As a result, we barely factored in head to head for this one unless it was a more recent game. What we did take into account was when a team played great recently, whether or not their head to head advantages came due to being at home or coming off a bye, and margin of victory.
There are so many factors at play that we don’t know how to sort everybody. Four of these eight teams involve first-year head coaches, so that shows you the future of the conference and the way these teams will beat up on each other.
To make matters worse, there’s only one game involving two of the teams from the middle of the pack this weekend, so the picture won’t get any clearer. But we’ll continue to do our best to analyze where everybody belongs.
So with the Vols playing the largest spoiler role over the weekend, let’s see how they shook up the league. And let’s look at what other teams did to help. These are our SEC Power Rankings following Week 11 of the 2018 college football season.