If you followed Big 12 football for any length of time in 2024, you know that there wasn’t much that went as predicted. It was hard enough to pick winners every week, let alone predict who the last team standing at the end of the season would be.
For context, a supremely popular prediction in August was Utah, and Oklahoma State would play for the Big 12 Championship in December.
Those teams proceeded to go a combined 2-16 in league play and 7-17 overall, finishing 13th and 16th in the conference standings, respectively.
It was virtually impossible to predict the Big 12 in 2024, and there’s a good chance that will also be the case in coming seasons. Here are five reasons, in hindsight, why the Big 12 is the most unpredictable and most entertaining conference in college football.
1. Arizona State Winning the Conference
The first and most obvious reason for this league’s unpredictability was the media vastly undervaluing what Kenny Dillingham had going in Tempe, Arizona. Coming off a 3-9 season in his first year as a head coach, the Sun Devils’ expectations were as low as they could possibly be.
Arizona State ranked 16th in the Preseason Media Poll with 141 points — 16 points behind Houston (157) and 55 points behind Cincinnati (196). Unbeknownst to us, Dillingham had built an uber-competitive squad with several superstars already on campus. Just a few weeks into the season, it was clear that Sam Leavitt, Cam Skattebo, and Jordyn Tyson would give defenses issues down the stretch. Then, Shamari Simmons, Prince Dorbah, Clayton Smith, and Xavion Alford all started to prove the defense was better than expected.
Before anyone knew it, the Sun Devils were in the Big 12 Championship, whooping up on Iowa State and grabbing a bid to the College Football Playoff.
2. Underdogs in Big 12 Play
One of the most incredible things about the Big 12 regular season was just how unpredictable games were on a week-to-week basis. While there was typically a game or two that looked ugly at the end of the game, it wasn’t uncommon for the underdog to be on the winning side of such an outcome.
There were 73 Big 12 games played in 2024, with the Big 12 Championship Game included, and after going back and taking a closer look at the betting information, underdogs throughout the 2024 season were 37-35-1 against the spread, covering the line 50.7%, putting the league slightly above the national average (50.4%).
That’s not the notable data point from this season, however.
According to BetMGM, college football underdogs win 24.7% of the time; so one out of every four games will result in an outright upset. The Big 12 in 2024 saw upsets in a whopping 39.7% of conference games, meaning that more than a third of games will end with the underdog winning outright.
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3. The Four-Way Tie
With all the Power Four leagues expanding beyond their previous membership in the past couple of years, we’ve seen the age of divisions go to the wayside. Like we’ve seen in the Big 12 for over a decade, the SEC East/West and Big Ten East/West are a thing of the past.
Still, there weren’t any races like the one we saw in the Big 12. After an entire season’s worth of games, the Big 12 Championship matchup wasn’t determined until BYU defeated Houston in the final game of the Big 12 regular season. With that game final, we had a four-way tie for first place, as BYU, Iowa State, Colorado, and Arizona State all ended the year with a 7-2 record in Big 12 play.
Predicting that would’ve been impossible to begin with, but then to find out that the tiebreakers didn’t even come down to head-to-head outcomes but common opponents? Now that’s insanity.
4. The New Kids Run the Block
One of the biggest discussion that came with Oklahoma and Texas leaving the Big 12 was who would take over as the new “bully” in the conference. Most people you asked would’ve said Oklahoma State, Kansas State, or Utah. Texas Tech and TCU were common answers, too, making it a pretty common assumption that the pre-existing Big 12 teams were the teams best situated to become the perennial favorites in the new-look Big 12.
If 2024 showed us anything, though, it was that we might not have one of those teams, at least not for a while. Three of the top four teams in the final rankings were expansion teams. Interestingly, the next six teams in the rankings were “legacy teams,” or teams that have been around since 2012 or before: Baylor, TCU, Texas Tech, Kansas State, West Virginia, and Kansas.
Behind them, we have five straight expansion teams — Cincinnati, Houston, Utah, Arizona, and UCF — and then Oklahoma State finished dead-last in a one-off season. Will we see a trend of a few expansions breaking through but mostly remaining in the bottom tier of the league? Or, will those teams transition in a few years and become perennial powerhouses? Honestly, there’s just no way to know, but in the first year of the new-look Big 12, it was the new guys that stole the show.
5. Preseason Rankings Flipped on Their Heads
The 2024 Big 12 Preseason Media Poll was released on July 2, 2024, and is represented by the table below:
| Rank | Team | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Utah | 906 (20) |
| 2. | Kansas State | 889 (19) |
| 3. | Oklahoma State | 829 (14) |
| 4. | Kansas | 772 (5) |
| 5. | Arizona | 762 (3) |
| 6. | Iowa State | 651 |
| 7. | West Virginia | 581 |
| 8. | UCF | 551 |
| 9. | Texas Tech | 532 |
| 10. | TCU | 436 |
| 11. | Colorado | 400 |
| 12. | Baylor | 268 |
| 13. | BYU | 215 |
| 14. | Cincinnati | 196 |
| 15. | Houston | 157 |
| 16. | Arizona State | 141 |
That’s a pretty good idea of what the vast majority of polls looked like then. Mike Gundy was returning his entire team from 10 wins a season ago, Kyle Whittingham’s group looked poised to be a problem in the Big 12, and second-year head coach Kenny Dillingham would be lucky to win a single game in Big 12 play.
Then, fast forward January and this is what the final standings actually ended up looking like:
| Rank | Team | Conf. | Overall | Preseason Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Arizona State | 7-2 | 11-3 | 16 |
| 2. | BYU | 7-2 | 11-2 | 13 |
| 3. | Iowa State | 7-2 | 11-3 | 6 |
| 4. | Colorado | 7-2 | 9-4 | 11 |
| 5. | Baylor | 6-3 | 8-5 | 14 |
| 6. | TCU | 6-3 | 9-4 | 10 |
| 7. | Texas Tech | 6-3 | 8-5 | 9 |
| 8. | Kansas State | 5-4 | 9-4 | 2 |
| 9. | West Virginia | 5-4 | 6-7 | 7 |
| 10. | Kansas | 4-5 | 5-7 | 4 |
| 11. | Cincinnati | 3-6 | 5-7 | 14 |
| 12. | Houston | 3-6 | 4-8 | 15 |
| 13. | Utah | 2-7 | 5-7 | 1 |
| 14. | UCF | 2-7 | 4-8 | 8 |
| 15. | Arizona | 2-7 | 4-8 | 5 |
| 16. | Oklahoma State | 0-5 | 3-5 | 3 |
Four of the top five teams in the final poll started the year in the bottom five of the preseason poll, including the team picked to finish last winning the entire conference.
Meanwhile, three of the bottom five teams in the final poll were inside the top five at the beginning of the year.
For comparison, if the Big Ten Preseason and Final Poll were to follow the same path as the Big 12, you would have:
- Purdue winning the conference
- Three teams out of Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Michigan, and Iowa finishing in the bottom five
- Four of the top five teams in the final standings being Northwestern, UCLA, Michigan State, Indiana, and Purdue.
For the SEC it would’ve been:
- Vanderbilt winning the league
- Three teams out of Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Ole Miss, and LSU finishing in the bottom five
- Four of the top five teams in the final standings being Florida, South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi State, and Vanderbilt.
Sure, there were surprising runs from teams like Indiana and South Carolina, but you just didn’t see anything like the Big 12 anywhere else.
That’s why, when it comes to college football, there’s just no denying that the most unpredictable conference in America is found right here, in the heartland.
