The college basketball season is heading down the home stretch of the 2024-25 season with four more Sweet 16 games on Friday, and then Elite 8 games coming up on Saturday and Sunday. And for the Big 12 Conference, there’s a clear task here: The Big 12 must get at least one team into next week’s Final Four.
If the Big 12 cannot accomplish this, the season will be a bust, and the Big 12 will have to cede the ground as the premier college basketball conference in the country.
The Big 12 has not had a Final Four team since 2022, when the Kansas Jayhawks won the National Championship as the No. 1 seed in the Midwest.
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Since then, the Big 12 has missed out on the last two Final Fours. The Big East and ACC have had two teams reach the Final Four, the Big Ten and SEC have had one each, and the Mountain West and Conference USA have each had one.
This year’s Sweet 16 features exclusively power conference teams, and at a time when the SEC is fresh off 14 of its 16 teams making the NCAA Tournament and going for the crown as the best college basketball conference in the country, to go along with being the best college football conference in the country, the Big 12 needs to put a dent in this narrative.
It was Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark who declared on College GameDay last month, “Over the last five to ten years, there’s no debate who the No. 1 basketball conference in America has been, and it’s been the Big 12. And if you think about it, with realignment the last two years, we got better. Think about Arizona, think about Houston here, and think about BYU. That being said, I do expect us to have a presence in San Antonio.”
That’s true, but we do not have long-term memories in sports, and while the Big 12 did have back-to-back National Champions in 2021 (Baylor) and 2022 (Kansas), while also having a Final Four team in five of the six NCAA Tournaments from 2016 to 2022, a third-straight year without a Final Four team would be catastrophic for the league and the narrative across the sport.
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And whether it’s fair or not, success in college basketball is defined by March Madness success. It’s a one-and-done Tournament that will define coaches, players, and programs. All the regular season success is nice, but it’s not how we determine success, and it never has been.
So, will the Big 12 live up to the moment? Or will it cede further ground to the SEC and Big Ten in the arms race of college sports?
We’ll find out more this weekend. It’s on you, Texas Tech and Houston.
