Texas Tech Football
Here are the Division I-A Power Ratings for the 2006 season for both Texas Tech, Texas A&M and Texas (I-AA team ranks):
Texas Tech
| Team | Rank |
| SMU | 73 |
| UTEP | 89 |
| Rice | 66 |
| Northwestern State | 120 [68 (I-AA)] |
| Average | 87.0 |
Texas A&M
| Team | Rank |
| Montana State | 120 [20 (I-AA)] |
| Fresno State | 83 |
| Louisiana Monroe | 88 |
| Miami | 54 |
| Average | 86.25 |
Texas
| Team | Rank |
| Rice | 66 |
| Arkansas State | 91 |
| Central Florida | 99 |
| TCU | 23 |
| Average | 69.75 |
The only caveat here is that I assigned the 2 Division I-AA teams a rank of 120, which means that they are probably worse than the worst I-A team. I realize that's a little presumptious, however, my time restricts me on my ability to research the rank and file of Division I-AA schools.
It's clear, Texas is the winner with an average ranking of 69.75. The TCU game obviously helped them quite a bit and Rich not being absolutely horrible is good.
A&M has a more difficult schedule than Tech by .75, which isn't much. I would think that when the Aggies scheduled Miami they were expecting a better program, but Miami is not the team they once were. I had also presumed that Fresno State was a better team last year, and they will probably improve on their ranking.
Tech is playing 3 decent teams and one Division I-AA team. Although it's somewhat difficult to admit, I think that SMU is getting better, slowly but surely. UTEP will probably struggle a little on offense as the incredibly awesome duo of Jordan Palmer and Johnny Lee Huggins have moved on to bigger and better things.
The point - all three teams are pretty much on the same level, but Texas has a game against a pretty good team that they probably didn't think was going to be as good as they are and A&M has a game against a team they thought was going to be good, but isn't as good as they used to be.