Is the Big 12 truly unpredictable?
The theme at the 2023 Big 12 Media Days has been "anyone can win this league." Is it possible to predict how a league with so much parity will play out?
It used to be relatively easy to predict how the Big 12 would play out. Oklahoma would play whichever of the other programs happened to be on a boom cycle with their roster so they could emerge from the crab bucket.
The Sooners and Longhorns are the only programs with the resources to build nationally competitive rosters year in and year out and Oklahoma was the only program of the two which knew how to leverage it.
Things changed in 2021. Lincoln Riley bailed on the program and in the aftermath of his departure took star quarterback Caleb Williams, whose athleticism was the primary reason the Sooners didn’t collapse in 2021 (despite some youthful and poor play on his own part at times).
In 2022 the Sooner collapse was realized with a 6-7 season while the Longhorns made some positive steps going from 5-7 in year one of Steve Sarkisian to 8-5. Texas still missed the Big 12 Championship Game and were not fully realized but they were 6-3 in Big 12 play and beat K-State on the road during the season.
Here were the preseason poll results for 2023…
2023 Big 12 Football Media Preseason Poll
1. Texas (41), 886
2. Kansas State (14), 858
3. Oklahoma (4), 758
4. Texas Tech (4), 729
5. TCU (3), 727
6. Baylor, 572
7. Oklahoma State (1), 470
8. UCF, 463
9. Kansas, 461
10. Iowa State, 334
11. BYU, 318
12. Houston, 215
13. Cincinnati, 202
14. West Virginia, 129
(parenthesis indicate number of 1st place votes)
…but as Neal Brown noted when confronting the placement of his West Virginia Mountaineers:
“I'll start with this because I'm sure I'm going to get asked about it. Upset about the media poll. Definitely do not agree with that. The good thing, the positive is that the media has not been,as far as predicting the Big 12 has not been successful in recent years, so I think that bodes well for us.”
He ain’t wrong.
It’s not just that the Big 12 is hard to predict (outside of Oklahoma when they’re rolling) but that the results are routinely wildly outside of expectations. Last year I was fairly bullish on K-State but missed pretty big overall on projections with K-State ultimately winning against TCU, whom I doubted up until the end.
The end of the season offered a clarifying note though. There might be a shortcut to evaluating which teams are on a “boom” cycle with their roster and thus have the means to compete for the conference crown.
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