Another excellent college football week is in the books, and Claudia Bellofatto and I discussed the latest top-25 rankings updates on our weekly Betting Life show. As always, enjoy the ranks, make sure you tune in Saturdays at 10 a.m ET for our live YouTube pregame show, and if you have any questions or comments, hit me up on X at @thorku. Thank you for reading!
Risers in the College Football Power Rankings
- Wisconsin Badgers
- Buffalo Bulls
- Purdue Boilermakers
- Louisiana Tech Bulldogs
You've got to start with Wisconsin, who, at the beginning of this season, looked like things were going to fall apart. They had injuries, particularly a quarterback with Tyler Van Dyke and then Chez Mellusi.
Their starting running back left the team, and things looked like they could go sideways real quick. Now you have consecutive blowout wins, including against Purdue. You could question that, because Purdue looked dead on arrival. But now, this past week, Purdue took Illinois to the wire and then Wisconsin beat up on a team that is going to make a bowl game on the road against Rutgers, 42-7. Wisconsin jumped 17 spots in the Power Rankings this week.
Buffalo is a team that that people need to start paying attention to, as far as a dark horse to win the MAC. Buffalo has been poorly coached for the past couple years. They fired the old staff. They brought in Pete Lembo, a guy who had been a really good MAC coach before. He had gotten tired of being a head coach and was an assistant coach at South Carolina for a couple years, but he wanted to get back in the game. He gets hired by buffalo.
Buffalo, over the weekend, knocked off the MAC frontrunners in Toledo, and it wasn't close. Beat them 30-15 — that Buffalo team is live now. They're an interesting team to monitor as we get into action. And the MAC is a wide open conference, so that's a team that could potentially steal it. Buffalo is up 15 spots in the Power Rankings.
And then a couple teams tied for third — 13 spot rise — the aforementioned Purdue Boilermakers, who had fallen down after they got drilled by Wisconsin. They they took Illinois to the wire, losing 50-49. The interesting thing about Purdue: In that game, they did not start Hudson Card. He had been concussed the game before against Wisconsin.
They bring in this Ryan Browne kid at quarterback. Browne gave them a real spark that we had not seen on offense from Purdue all season. Will they stay with Ryan Browne? They probably should even when Hudson Card gets healthy — that'll be something interesting to watch. But if that Purdue team has an offensive thrust like this, they have a really good pass rush on defense. The rest of defense isn't very good, but between those two things, if they can move the ball a little bit, they could be frisky down down the stretch.
And then the last one I wanted to shout out is Louisiana Tech. Just like Purdue, they're up 13 spots. Louisiana Tech is not a great team, but in Conference USA you have sort of that bottom rung there. Louisiana Tech might be at the top of that, and they might be able to pull off some upsets as we go forward. They had played a bunch of teams close, hadn't lost by more than 10 points leading into this game. Then they go up against Middle Tennessee State and just absolutely drummed them. It was a game that we talked about last week. Louisiana Tech wins that one 48-21 — that's a team that is going to win some games in Conference USA and could save Sonny Cumbie's job here by making a bowl game.
Fallers in the College Football Power Rankings
- Rutgers Scarlet Knights
- Arkansas State Red Wolves
- Eastern Michigan Eagles
- San Jose State Spartans
Rutgers falls down 15 spots after a very disappointing game. Wisconsin doesn't have a very good run defense, and so you figured that at least Kyle Monangai was going to have a day. It was a bit of a slanted offensive philosophy by Rutgers there — they were trying to throw the ball a little bit too much initially, and then the game script got away from them.
Athan Kaliakmanis is not a good quarterback, and putting the ball in the air as many times as they were against what is a better Wisconsin pass defense was not a road to victory. The Rutgers offense came apart in that game. They're down.
The two top teams that tied for the biggest fall this week are in the G5: Arkansas State and Eastern Michigan both fall 16 spots. Arkansas State got drummed by Texas State 41-9. Arkansas State was a team that I was kind of bullish on heading into the season because they returned 10 starters on offense, including an exciting dual threat, young quarterback, Jaylen Raynor. When they put him into the lineup last year, that's when Butch Jones and the Red Wolves' fortunes turned around, and they were able to rally into a bowl game. I'm not sure what's going on with that offense yet. This was a game that you would have projected them to put up some points and put up some yards, even if it was in a losing effort, but the offense wasn't viable against Texas State.
Eastern Michigan is a team that was playing decent — they were 4-1 heading into that game against Miami. They had all kinds of issues there. And Eastern Michigan's pass defense is alright. They have a good pass rush. They were not able to get any heat on Brett Gabbert, the Miami, Ohio quarterback, in that 38-14 loss, and they weren't running the ball effectively.
Eastern Michigan's offense is always going to struggle. They have to have a better defensive performance like that. Miami's offense finally explodes. And unfortunately for Eastern Michigan, their defense didn't look as good as it had in previous weeks.
The last one, San Jose State, drops 14 spots after they they lose to Colorado State, 31-14. San Jose State was ambushing teams at the start of the season because you had Ken Niumatalolo, former Navy coach. He had hired an FCS young coordinator who ran sort of the complete opposite offensive system, and between all this stuff, nobody had any tape on San Jose State.
So they were doing all these interesting things on offense and were catching defenses off guard. Nick Nash was going wild. They were doing these trick plays, everything. Now teams have tape on San Jose State. Colorado State was able to handle them pretty easily. It will be interesting to see going forward whether the San Jose State coaching staff can make adjustments to their game plans in order to try to stay ahead of the curve. But not a good sign here in recent weeks for San Jose State.
Oregon Ducks College Football Futures Betting Outlook
If you missed the future betting opportunities on Oregon, then the busses probably left the station there. And we had mentioned, particularly last week, that now is the time to buy in them if you thought they had any shot to get the upset here. And I felt like a broken record every week when we would do the Heisman segment being like, “There is real value on Dillon Gabriel, there's real value on Dillon Gabriel.” Kept saying it every single week. And he goes from 16 or 18 to one, depending on the book you were looking at the last couple weeks, to now he's No. 2 on the odds boards at +350, +375, depending on the book.
This was a very impressive performance by Dillon Gabriel. They attacked that Ohio State secondary — one that we hadn't seen stretch as much as we did against Oregon. Tremendous game by Gabriel. He he got most of the ink, and deservedly so, and the part of this game that I was super impressed by — and I don't know if you could have projected it going forward — was the way that Oregon played on both sides of the line of scrimmage.
Their offensive line had not played as well as we were hoping for at the beginning of the season. They played really well — paved the way for Jordan James to have 23 carries for 115 yards. Dylan Gabriel mostly had clean pockets to work with — he was able to extend plays and find guys downfield.
And then on the other side, Oregon's defensive line front seven did a really good job against that Ohio State running game. You had the one long run for TreVeyon Henderson. If you take that away, they totally shut them down. Quinshon Judkins finished that game with 11 carries for 23 yards. So a very good job by Oregon on those lines of scrimmage. We already know that they have the skill talent. They have talent in the secondary as well. So big, big stock up for Oregon.
