Junior Demarcus Ayers and the Cougars have one more home game to impress voters when they host Temple next Saturday in the AAC Championship game. | File photo/The Cougar
The Associated Press Top 25 poll for week 14 of the college football season saw quite a bit of rearrangement following a number of key rivalry games.
The Cougars got back on track after their first loss of the season, dominating conference rival United States Naval Academy en route to a 52-31 win, which saw them receive a four-spot bump in the polls up to 17th place.
The Clemson University Tigers and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes remain the only two undefeated teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision heading into the conference championship weekend.
The Tigers stayed atop the poll in a firm first place, followed again by the University of Alabama Crimson Tide.
The University of Oklahoma Sooners jumped up two spots in third after dismantling rival Oklahoma State University, following by the Iowa Hawkeyes in fourth place and the Michigan State University Spartans in fifth.
The University of Notre Dame experienced a last-second loss to Stanford University and dropped five spots from fourth into ninth in the polls.
With the win, Stanford found themselves as the biggest winners in this week’s ranking, after a six-spot increase placed them in seventh.
The University of Florida Gators dropped eight spots, the most in the poll, after suffering just their second loss of the season to the rival Florida State University Seminoles.
The American Athletic Conference kept three teams in the rankings, with UH being the highest ranked at 17th. Temple University rang in at 20th, a five-spot increase from last week, while Navy dropped six spots down to 22nd overall after losing to Houston.
Washington State University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Mississippi State University and the University of Toledo all dropped from the rankings after suffering losses over the weekend.
The Big 10 Conference again had the most teams ranked in the top 25, with six programs, followed again by the Southeastern Conference, Big 12 Conference and Pac-12 Conference.
The Cougars will host Temple in the inaugural AAC Championship game Saturday at TDECU Stadium with kickoff scheduled for 11 a.m.
the houston media is really starting to get behind this team now…great to see that at last….
–posting at the Coog-It UH football forum, far from thread-deleting moronic moderators of the other forum.
This city only seems to celebrate its college football team when it’s winning, and I still hardly hear stats or praise on local news and radio. A&M and UT however, I hear about all the time despite a losing season.
As for me, I’ve never cared much about athletics either in the past or now, but I’m not going to be singing praise when over $100,000,000 get spent on making our sports team relevant instead of being used for academia. We should be an institution for learning and focusing on our students rather than trying to look good to others by winning games.
It’s totally okay to not be in to athletics, but a good sports team, especially in Texas, is a deciding factor in a lot of people to go to a certain school. Athletics teams bring in a lot of money over time. Sure, the upfront investment for facilities and staff are steep, but I’d argue that an athletics team does a lot more good for a school than bad in terms of finances.