What’s going on in the Big 12 and beyond? I expand and explain every Sunday in Postscripts at Heartland College Sports, your home for independent Big 12 coverage.
This week, it’s about the Big 12’s emerging dominant teams, but that dominance only got the league so far in the College Football Playoff.
The Rise of Big 12 Dominance
In 2024, Big 12 Conference football was ruled by parity. Four teams finished the season 7-2 at the top of the standings, and three more were at 6-3. Tiebreakers got Arizona State and Iowa State to the title game. League commissioner Brett Yormark touted that parity as a calling card for the conference. But he also signaled something else at the podium before that game. He believed that, eventually, a dominant team or two would emerge and that it was needed.
On Saturday, there was little mistaking the best two teams in the Big 12 this season. Texas Tech and BYU were 8-1 in league play. Texas Tech’s only loss was to last year’s champion, Arizona State. BYU’s only loss was to Texas Tech. Both were 11-1. That’s domination by any measure, even after Tech’s 34-7 win over the Cougars.
So, I asked Yormark about his quote last year and whether it still holds. Does the Big 12 need a dominant team or two?
He said he believes the Big 12 is the “deepest conference in America.” He also said this.
“At some point you need those brands to kind of start distancing themselves, and I think Texas Tech and BYU have done that this year,” Yormark said.
To Yormark, the separation is about the playoff and the conversation that’s been had, especially about BYU, the past few weeks in the context of the College Football Playoff, which the Cougars were left out of on Sunday.
“…there is a separation that you’re starting to see a little bit led by Texas Tech and BYU, and I think that’s good for the conference because we need our schools to be part of the national conversation,” Yormark said. “When you think about the Big 12 and our football product, I think this year that started to happen, and I think you’ll see more of that evolution next year. Critically important for us.”
The importance of that was underscored in the ramp-up to Saturday’s game. Texas Tech was firmly established in the CFP, win or lose, on Saturday. This is the best Red Raiders team I’ve ever seen. But remember — much of the conversation outside of those of us that actually watch Big 12 games has been about the money spent on the roster and not about how well Tech has played. But that spending DID put Texas Tech in the national conversation — and got a great money quote from linebacker Jacob Rodriguez.
BYU, instead, has been treated like a red-headed stepchild by the tastemakers of college football, namely ESPN. Kalani Sitake’s flirtation with Penn State and the donors that helped keep him in BYU got more coverage this week than their CFP hopes. It’s why Yormark extensively stumped for the Cougars in his pre-game press conference. It’s why Tech coach Joey McGuire kicked off his post-game press conference by calling for the committee to include BYU.
The country treated the Big 12 Championship Game as a play-in game for BYU. That was unfair.
It’s not that there weren’t other worthy teams vying for the final one or two spots in the playoff. There were. As I wrote last week, we ended up with 15 power conference teams with 10 or more wins going into conference championship game weekend, which made the committee’s job harder.
All of them have quality resumes. But BYU was one of only four teams with nine or more power conference wins going into the weekend. Ohio State had 10, while Indiana and Oregon had nine. That tells me something.
But it told ESPN nothing. When it started comparing at-large resumes during the week, BYU was stuck in the fine print. BYU’s social media team took the original graphic with Alabama, Notre Dame, and Miami and edited the Cougars in via a social media post.
By the ACC title game on Saturday, ESPN was ignoring them.
In 2022, the CFP committee made it clear after the final rankings that TCU, which was inside the Top 4, wasn’t punished for losing the Big 12 title game to Kansas State. Being undefeated at the time helped. So was the fact that the game was a classic. The Horned Frogs — who were screwed out of a berth in 2014 — remained in the field. It didn’t punish SMU last year for losing the ACC title game to Clemson.
But, in 2023, the committee trashed Florida State, which went 13-0 and won its conference title game due to quarterback Jordan Travis’ injury. They dropped the Seminoles out completely.
This year, No. 11 BYU — that’s No. 11 CFP-ranked BYU — lost to No. 4 CFP-ranked Texas Tech by 27 points. No. 9 CFP-ranked Alabama lost to No. 3 CFP-ranked Georgia, 28-7, on Saturday. That’s a 21-point deficit.
BYU was punished. Alabama was not. BYU dropped one spot. Alabama didn’t drop a spot. BYU didn’t make the playoff. Alabama did.
CFP spokesperson Hunter Yurachek said they evaluated the conference championship games and said that Alabama’s body of work before that — which included a win over Georgia — kept them from dropping, despite the loss. BYU dropped, he said, because of the way it lost to Texas Tech.
No Big 12 Respect
But this is less about punishment and more about how we got here. This committee simply didn’t value a BYU team with nine power conference wins. It didn’t value the overall depth and strength of the Big 12 and it didn’t value its “brand.” But it valued others.
After weeks of circular logic from Yurachek, who can’t seem to clearly explain what the committee truly values, it is clear they can’t see a world where a school like BYU — which is a national brand on its own — is not a playoff-worthy team, even though it won 11 games and reached its conference title game.
Yormark laid out the stakes before Saturday’s game.
“No Power 4 team with an 11-1 record has ever finished outside the top 10 in the CFP rankings going into the championship week,” he said. “BYU has been underappreciated.”
Well, we saw some history on Sunday. BYU was the first 11-1 team to be left out of the Top 10.
Plenty happened on Sunday that unsettled me. BYU was punished for losing a game where Alabama wasn’t. The committee flipped Miami over Notre Dame when their head-to-head sat there for weeks, and ESPN’s Booger McFarland kept saying “their resumes were complete,” even though they were complete last week. Nick Saban implied that the Group of 6 schools that made it on merit, based on the criteria — Tulane and James Madison — really didn’t belong. Their analysts spent reams of time on Miami, Alabama, and Notre Dame and scant time on BYU.
“This is a bracket that people are going to talk about forever,” ESPN’s Chris Fowler said, “And not just because Notre Dame got left out.”
He’s right, and it puts Yormark in a corner. He’s in favor of the 5+11 model. He reinforced that on Saturday. He wants each conference to earn it on the field. But, for the second straight 12-team playoff, the Big 12 had one representative. Some of the models being floated would give the league more access. Yormark is all about access. He may, ultimately, bend to guarantee more Big 12 teams in the playoff.
Or, he can wait for teams like Texas Tech, BYU, and others to build into the dominant national brands he believes his league needs to be nationally relevant. After Sunday’s rankings, it is clear that college football’s powers will make it an uphill climb.
