The 2025 Big 12 football schedule has been unveiled, giving fans the chance to start planning their routes for the football season next fall.
Not all routes are created equally, though, as the path to Arlington is undoubtedly more manageable for some than it is for others.
Today, we’ll take a look at the three easiest 2025 football schedules in the Big 12.
How Strength of Schedule Was Determined
Earlier this month, we released a Way-Too-Early Big 12 Football Power Rankings for 2025.
After some adjustments (home-field advantage, Vegas odds, etc.) I ranked each team’s schedule based on the average ranking of their Big 12 opponents and the average power ranking of the teams they’ll face on the road.
Every team’s schedule has been scored for difficulty, and the score represents the average rank that a selected team will face in Big 12 play. For example, Utah has the hardest Big 12 schedule of any team in the league, with a score of 6.445. That means the average of Utah’s Big 12 opponents is 6th in our projected power ranking.
Think of it as a scale of 1.000 to 16.000. The closer a team’s schedule is to 1.0, the more difficult it is, and the closer to 16.0, the more manageable.
Hardest Big 12 Football Schedules in 2025
#1 Utah Utes
Big 12 Schedule Score: 6.445
Big 12 Home Games: Texas Tech, Arizona State, Colorado, Cincinnati, Kansas State
Big 12 Road Games: West Virginia, BYU, Baylor, Kansas
Nonconference: @ UCLA, Cal Poly, @ Wyoming
I’m not sure who Utah pissed off in the scheduling department, but the toughest Big 12 football schedule belongs to Utah. The nonconference is more than manageable, but it gets much tougher after that. Just two of Utah’s nine Big 12 opponents missed a bowl game in 2024, and both of them were just one win short.
Road games at West Virginia, BYU, Baylor, and Kansas will all be tricky, and three of their five home games come against teams at or near the top of our power rankings. The Utes will play each of the top six teams in FanDuel’s Big 12 Championship odds for 2025.
#2 TCU Horned Frogs
Big 12 Schedule Score: 7.165
Big 12 Home Games: Colorado, Baylor, Iowa State, Cincinnati
Big 12 Road Games: Arizona State, Kansas State, West Virginia, BYU, Houston
Nonconference: @ North Carolina, Abilene Christian, SMU
With location taken into account, there’s an argument that TCU got the toughest draw of anyone in the Big 12. The Horned Frogs play each of the top four teams in Vegas’ Big 12 odds, and three of them on the road. Cincinnati and Houston are the only trams on their schedule that didn’t make a bowl game last season.
The nonconference adds to the difficulty, too, as North Carolina head coach Bill Belichick will have a full offseason to prepare for the Horned Frogs’ offense. That, plus a rivalry game against a CFP contender in SMU, makes this perhaps the toughest overall schedule in the league.
#3 West Virginia Mountaineers
Big 12 Schedule Score: 7.445
Big 12 Home Games: Utah, TCU, Colorado, Texas Tech
Big 12 Road Games: Kansas, BYU, UCF, Houston, Arizona State
Nonconference: Robert Morris, @ Ohio, Pittsburgh
West Virginia has a lot of new to break in this season, and unfortunately, it appears they won’t have a favorable schedule to do so. Houston, UCF, and Kansas missed bowl games in 2024, but KU should be much better, while trips to Orlando and Houston won’t exactly be easy.
On top of that, they’ll face six of the seven best teams in our power rankings, with Kansas State being the only exclusion. Rich Rodriguez has had a lot of success in Morgantown, but it looks like he might have plenty of things working against him for his first season back.
