It’s still very early to be looking ahead to the 2025-26 College Football Playoff, but part of what makes this the best sport in the world is just how much time is spent looking ahead during the offseason.
The winter transfer portal, coaching carousel, and NFL Draft declarations are behind us, and now we can start to take a look at who the best teams in 2025 might be.
The first wave of way-too-early Top 25 polls have come and gone, and there’s a heavy dose of SEC and Big Ten at the top, as expected. But what about the Big 12? How do college football experts see this league next season?
It was rare that a Big 12 team broke into the Top 10, as our cumulative poll has Arizona State coming in as the highest-ranked of the bunch at No. 12, while BYU (16), Kansas State (22), and Iowa State (23) all got the nod as well.
The better question, however, might be who will actually win the league and represent the Big 12 in the College Football Playoff?
On3’s Andy Staples tackled this in his 2026 CFP bracket prediction, as seen below.
According to Staples, it will be BYU who wins the league and gets the No. 4 seed in the playoff as one of the four highest-ranked conference champions. Their reward? A date with No. 5 Ohio State, who is fresh off a national championship and has a projected win over 12-seed Tulane in the first round.
BYU has been somewhat polarizing amongst the media since the end of the season, as their 11-2 record has many thinking that a regression might be coming in 2025.
“Ranked as high as No. 9 in one poll and unranked in several others, most organizations expect the law of averages to consume the Cougars,” 247Sports’ Brad Crawford said. “BYU brings back several key starters from an 11-win team, one-third of those victories coming by a single possession including triumphs over Utah and Oklahoma State essentially as time expired. The early frontrunner in the Big 12 looks like Utah or Arizona State judging by the collection of preseason rankings with BYU taking a step back from the top tier.”
BYU finished off the 2024 season as one of college football’s most underrated teams, sitting at 11-2 with multiple Top 25 wins. The group took down No. 13 Kansas State, No. 23 Colorado, and College Football Playoff participant SMU, who finished the season with just three losses.
