This is the last of five conference power rankings this offseason, corresponding with my G5 preview series. Full team previews can be found underneath each team subhead, and also on this home page.
Tier Five
Undergoing a serious rebuild or on the verge of a firing.
11. Temple Owls
Temple can feel some optimism for the first time in several years entering this season. That’s the positive. The Owls have traded in Rod Carey for Stan Drayton, a career assistant coach who brings new energy to a program in desperate need of it. Drayton is unproven and has a lot of questions to answer about his ability to direct a program, sure, but Carey left as one of the most despised men on campus by players and fans alike. Drayton doesn’t have that baggage to deal with.
Any optimism about his tenure will have to remain hypothetical for at least a few years, though. The Owls have plenty of vacancies to fill throughout a lineup that was already disastrously bad a year ago, and no obvious candidates to take over in just about every key position. You may be able to generate some excitement about D’Wan Mathis if you’re basing it only around his status as a blue-chip recruit several years ago, but this team is going to be a work in progress. Check back in with the Owls in a few years.
Jeff Scott entered South Florida ahead of the 2020 season with a similar feeling around him. He was expected to breathe new life into a football team that had fallen stale under Charlie Strong’s direction, bringing with him the energy and recruiting acumen of Dabo Swinney’s Clemson program. In some ways, those hopes have paid out. Scott has found some success on the trail, and he’s hit the transfer portal hard to bring in P5 castoffs.
But as he enters his third season at the helm, the Bulls have shown essentially no growth on the field. Scott has turned over his coordinators in hopes of finding a spark, and Baylor transfer Gerry Bohanon should be a more competent option at quarterback than his predecessors. With P5 talent throughout the skill corps on both sides of the football, USF does have room to reach some of the lofty expectations and make some real gains this season.
There’s just the little issue of line play. No matter how many Clemson transfers Scott brings in at wideout or halfback or anywhere else, USF hasn’t been able to keep its quarterback upright, direct a rushing attack or put any pressure on opposing offenses because of abysmal line play. And unless there’s a major shift this offseason for several incumbent linemen, that isn’t changing in 2022.
Tier Four
Some shot at a bowl game, some fun players, but not good enough to make real noise.
Tulane has the benefit of talent, which several teams down at the bottom of the league cannot claim. The Green Wave haven’t recruited at the top of the league under Willie Fritz, but they aren’t near the bottom either. Since 2018, their recruiting classes have had an average composite rating of 160.34 – good enough for sixth in the league, just behind SMU and Houston but ahead of USF, ECU, Temple, Tulsa and Navy. With almost all of those teams on the schedule year-in and year-out, Tulane should be a consistent bowl team.
That’s true with this roster too. Quarterback Michael Pratt is experienced and has at least some talent around him. The defense has had its issues but is similarly talented. Yet, the Green Wave are fresh off of a 2-10 season and have fallen into something of a mid-tenure crisis. Fritz, a long-time proponent of the spread triple option, hired Chip Long to coordinate his offense last year, and turned to Jim Swoboda this year to replace him. Both are standard spread coordinators, with Swoboda bringing even less of an option game to the system than Long did.
For as long as Tulane drifts away from the ideology that got it this far, it’s going to underachieve that talent level. The Green Wave should be able to beat the league’s bottom dwellers, but expecting anything beyond that with such a mismatched offensive ideology is probably too much to ask.
Quarterback, quarterback, quarterback. It’s always been the defining position for triple option service academy programs, and it’s no different this year for Navy. The Midshipmen have spent the last several years adrift without a strong option behind center and could be in serious danger of needing to move on from Ken Niumatalolo if the veteran head coach doesn’t find an option to wrest the offense from its recent slumber sooner than later.
This year, the best bet is Tai Lavatai. He showed signs of ability last season, though he also struggled significantly with growing pains and had too many instances of disappearing from games. His final stretch of games was his best of the year, so there are reasons for hope that he can be the man to lift Navy back into bowl contention and beyond.
If he can’t? Navy falls much further down this list, and runs the risk of another 3- or 4-win campaign. How many more of those can Niumatalolo afford?
Tulsa is as it was. There’s plenty to replace on defense, including coordinator Joseph Gillespie, which is going to do serious damage to this team’s ceiling entering 2022. Quarterback Davis Brin returns and offers a beacon of hope for a team that hasn’t had much success offensively in recent years.
It would be a different way for the Golden Hurricane to win, but playing effective offense was what Phillip Montogmery was hired for. To compete for a bowl berth this season, he’s going to need to manufacture exactly that – while hoping that the new-look defense isn’t sitting at the bottom of the league.
Tier Three
Intriguing, but not likely to compete for a title without a few players or coaches seriously exceeding expectations.
It’s a very, very important season for Ryan Silverfield’s Tigers. They’ve seen diminishing returns since Mike Norvell’s departure and desperately need to rebound from a 6-6 season. With the top of the league slated to depart, there’s going to be room for new powers to emerge. SMU looks positioned well to take over where Houston and Cincinnati left off, and Memphis is often mentioned as the best contender to fill the spot alongside the Mustangs.
If they continue to perform as they did in 2021, though, they’ll be stuck firmly in the middle of the league, leaving an opening for new teams like UAB and UTSA or sleeping incumbents like ECU or USF.
With a decent chunk of experience throughout the team, including at quarterback, Memphis should be able to improve. New defensive coordinator Matt Barnes has been tasked with reinventing a recently bad group and could add some immediate value, even if the defense is not instantly solid.
With an offense that plays to its potential, that would be enough for Memphis to be solidly included among the league’s second tier this fall. If the offense underachieves again, though? Both Silverfield and Memphis will be in trouble.
ECU and Mike Houston seem to be headed in the opposite direction. It took the former James Madison head coach a little longer than expected, but his Pirates started to click in 2021, qualifying for their first bowl berth in seven years behind an improved offense and a better-than-awful defense.
Much of that offense returns, including fifth-year quarterback Holton Ahlers, a pair of electric running backs and one of the best deep threats in the conference in wideout C.J. Johnson. With seven starters back on the other side of the field as well, ECU should be in for another step forward – though a schedule with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and N.C. State is going to make that hard to prove.
Tier Two
Teams that can win a title if they find suitable answers for one or two major questions.
4. UCF Knights
Think of UCF as the supersized version of USF. More talent from the portal, more recent success, more ability in the trenches and a more proven system operating under essentially the same framework in recruiting. Gus Malzahn has hit the portal hard, bringing in double-digit P5 prospects to fill out an already talented roster.
When he did the same last year, even with an injury to quarterback Dillon Gabriel, the Knights went 9-4 and finished third in the league. Yet, it felt like they should have been more. Malzahn is many things, but he’s no longer on the cutting edge of the sport offensively. UCF’s system looked stale and answerless against the better defenses it played last fall.
The Knights are too talented to dip below fourth or fifth in the league, but they’ve been limited by coaching several years (and multiple tenures) in a row now, and even with a more skillful bunch, there’s no reason to expect anything different this fall.
3. SMU Mustangs
New coach, same Mustangs. Rhett Lashlee is taking over for Sonny Dykes and bringing at least a few unique ideas, but Lashlee once coached for Dykes, runs essentially the same offense and really won’t change that much about the way that SMU is run.
That’s no problem. SMU has been among the league’s best for several years running, playing with an electric and explosive pass-first offense and hoping that it can muster enough points to make up for a generally lacking defense.
With Tanner Mordecai (or Preston Stone) and Rashee Rice back this fall, not much of the offense is going to change. SMU’s ceiling will be set instead by new DC Scott Symons’ ability to improve the defense on the fly. If that group can approach the top half of the league, there’s not a team on the schedule that the Mustangs can’t give a serious challenge. If the offense is alone in its success, SMU is probably headed for another 7- or 8-win season. Not bad, not as good as it could be.
Tier One
The best of the best. Very few if any questions, should be favorites in every league game they play except for their head-to-head matchup.
This is the Dana Holgorsen team to end all Dana Holgorsen teams. The Cougars have a returning starter at quarterback in the solid-if-unspectacular Clayton Tune, a superstar wideout in Nathaniel Dell, a capable running back in Ta’Zhawn Henry and a huge, pass-blocking offensive line. That group will have no problem running the Holgorsen offense, which finished 15th nationally in points per game last season.
That’s standard fare for Holgorsen. The difference in this bunch is on the other side of the ball. Defensive coordinator Doug Belk has built one of the best defenses in America with the Cougars, and though defensive lineman Logan Hall and defensive back Marcus Jones are gone, Houston has a huge chunk of its great 2021 group back for 2022. That includes one of the most disruptive defensive lines in the sport, lead now by Derek Parrish and Chidozie Nwankwo. You’ll be hearing at least one of those names in the early rounds of the next few drafts.
The king stays the king. Cincinnati hasn’t lost to an AAC opponent since Dec. 7, 2019, claiming the 2020 and 2021 league titles without a scratch. The latter team was impressive enough to earn the G5 its first-ever nod to the playoff.
Much of that team has departed. Desmond Ridder and Jerome Ford leave the backfield, as does top widout Alec Price. Much of Luke Fickell’s phenomenal defense is off to the NFL, from Curtis Brooks at tackle and Myjai Sanders at end to the secondary, which loses safety Bryan Cook and, more importantly, the Thorpe Award winner Coby Bryant and counterpart Sauce Gardner, who was even better than Bryant. In between, the Cats have to replace rushing specialist linebackers Darrian Beavers and Joel Dublanko.
Yet, they’re No. 1 on the power rankings. Because despite all of those losses, Cincinnati still has the best team in the league on paper.
Ben Bryant arrives from EMU to relieve Ridder at quarterback. Corey Kiner takes over from Ford, coming in from LSU. Tre Tucker and Tyler Scott bump up to larger roles at wideout, with a pair of established tight ends returning and the entire starting offensive line intact.
On the other side of the ball, Malik Vann and Jowon Briggs have the chance to be an even better pairing than Brooks/Sanders. Wilson Huber, Deshawn Pace, Ivan Pace Jr., Jaheim Thomas and Ty Van Fossen form an outstanding linebacker room, with Arquon Bush and Ja’von Hicks back in the secondary. Questions remain about replacing Bryant and Gardner, but it’s hard to ask much of anything to the rest of the defense. Until Houston proves it can beat the Bearcats, Cincinnati stays at No. 1.