College GameDay just wrapped up its Week 10 show on a Big 12 campus for the first time in over three years. And within hours of finishing in Salt Lake City, it was announced that the pre-game show on ESPN would be going to back-to-back Big 12 games. The program announced on social media that it would be hosting in Lubbock for Week 11 when the Texas Tech Red Raiders host the BYU Cougars in a battle between two of the top teams in the conference.
One week after I wrote that College GameDay was dead to Big 12 fans, the show has proven me wrong, again. I’ve said for the last week that I thought it was highly unlikely that the Big 12 would get to host back-to-back College GameDays considering the conference had not been featured in three seasons in a true, traditional, campus setting. The show was at the 2022 Big 12 Championship Game in Arlington, and then at the 2023 Red River Rivalry between Oklahoma and Texas, but the last on-campus Big 12 game was Kansas vs. TCU in October of 2022.
And now, fast-forward more than three years, and here we are talking about back-to-back Big 12 games as the host site for GameDay. If you watched GameDay on Saturday, you were tipped off by something Kirk Herbstreit said, when he more or less confirmed a Lubbock trip was likely if Texas Tech beat K-State on Saturday.
And let me say, I am genuinely appreciative that ESPN elected to go to Salt Lake and Lubbock for two-straight weeks. Both games feature teams with outstanding fan bases who are worthy of being highlighted by the premiere college football pregame show. Utah fans are always underratedly rabid, while Texas Tech fans have been waiting almost two decades for a team of this caliber to step on campus. And the road teams in both games, Cincinnati and BYU, have great stories to tell as well. Cincinnati finds itself ranked for the first time since its College Football Playoff run in 2021, while BYU is on a historic two-season stretch, and this year it’s being powered by one of the great freshman stories in college football in quarterback Bear Bachmeier.
So as we get ready to hype up another week where the Big 12 will be front and center in the college football world, this is a reminder that this league deserves this. The conference does not appear to have the top-tier teams of the Big Ten, or the depth of the SEC, although the College Football Playoff may tell a different story come December and January. But this is the third-best conference in the country, and it’s about damn time ESPN started treating it as such. I’m glad they are, and I can’t wait to see how fired up Lubbock is next Saturday morning.
