Who will win the Big 12? Part II, accounting for asymmetry
The Big 12 has long had a reputation for being a shootout-heavy, Wild Wild West sort of league. Is there a chance of a gunslinger team taking home the trophy?
In my last column, I noted (for the second time) why Utah is well positioned to routinely contend for Big 12 Championships and take home the crown and subsequent playoff spot in 2024. The Utes have the potential to be the new overlords of the league, although they have less capacity for domination than did the Oklahoma Sooners or (theoretically) the Texas Longhorns.
The Sooners flexed two muscles in dominating the league from 2000-through-2021 when Lincoln Pausanias Riley bailed for USC. The first was their blueblood privilege and capacity for accumulating NFL talent at the “core four” positions of left tackle, Edge, nose tackle, and defensive tackle. The Sooners weren’t super consistent across the D-line but they usually had at least one troublesome player up front on that side and masterful O-line coach Bill Bedenbaugh (still there) maintained a remarkable pipeline of NFL tackles to bookend both the left and right sides of their lines.
The other muscle flexed by Oklahoma was their embrace of the historical shootout nature of the Big 8/12. Barry Switzer adopted the Wishbone from Texas and used it to dominate the Big 8 for years, Bob Stoops brought the Air Raid and Mike Leach to the Big 12 in 1999 and later introduced the league to HUNH (hurry-up, no-huddle) offense in 2008. Oklahoma has always been an exemplar of “flyover football.”
You couldn’t overcome Oklahoma with asymmetrical warfare, attacking them with a shootout style, because they were all about it. But Utah? That’s not really a team that embraces a shootout with their opponents, although they aren’t totally unfamiliar with combating that style. They don’t have the same knack or skill for blowing up defenses that the best Oklahoma teams enjoyed.
Is there a chance one of the traditional Big 12 teams (or one of the new ones) is able to snag the top spot and are awarded with the #4 seed in the college football playoffs by simply playing terrific offense and outscoring Utah? It’s worth considering.