Predicting the Big 12 Has Become an Almost Pointless Task

Mike Gundy has spoken of the Big 12’s parity for years, but here lately, that parity has almost felt like randomness.

Arizona State won the league last football season after being picked to finish 16th (last). Meanwhile, Utah was picked to win the conference just to finish 13th.

If we’re not already in prediction season, we will be soon. The Big 12’s Preseason Poll won’t come out for a few more weeks, but when it does, it’s going to be hard to take it too seriously this year.

I went back and looked at the past 10 Big 12 Preseason Polls and compared them to the end-of-year standings, which provided evidence that this already parity-driven league is getting more chaotic.

For a little math exercise, I mapped out what the difference was in each team’s prediction and final standing (ex: OSU was picked seventh in 2023 and finished second). Then I added all of those differences up (no negative numbers), and then divided the total by the number of teams in the league. This probably isn’t the most mathematically efficient formula to break these numbers down, but it’s the best my simpleminded-math brain could handle.

So here’s the average difference between where Big 12 teams are predicted and finish across the past decade:

2015 — 1.2
2016 — 1.8
2017 — 1.6
2018 — 1.8
2019 — 2
2020 — 1.2
2021 — 2.2
2022 — 3.4
2023 — 3
2024 — 6.9

Here’s that data in chart form:

As you can see, after years of hovering around the 1.5-2 range, things have really taken off in terms of variance over the past few seasons. Some of that probably has to do with my imperfect formula when dealing with the different number of teams in the league, but there are other things to point to as to why parity in the Big 12 has increased.

The Two Locks of the Late 2010s

If you were filling out a Big 12 Preseason Poll from 2015 to 2020, there were two free spaces:

1. The Sooners were going to win
2. Kansas was going to finish last

OU won six titles in a row between 2015 and 2020. The Sooners were actually predicted to finish third in 2015 as that streak was getting ready to start but were picked first in the rest of those years.

Meanwhile, the Jayhawks were picked 10th and finished 10th every year from 2015 to 2021.

Having those two locks in a 10-team league meant pollsters really just needed to predict spots No. 2 through 9. The parity within those eight spots could get a little crazy, but it wasn’t like the 2024 season where four teams finished 10 or more spots from where they were predicted.

Now those two ends of the spectrum are gone. OU is literally gone, playing in the SEC. Then there aren’t bottom-feeders in the league to the extent that Kansas was back then.

NIL and the Portal Almost Assuredly Playing a Role

The transfer portal has been in operation since 2018, but it’s not an outlandish thing to surmise that in recent seasons it has had an even bigger impact on the sport.

Jalen McCleskey’s midyear exit in 2018 sort of felt like the start of the portal era in the Oklahoma State world. It was a big deal back then that after playing four games, he hopped in the portal. Nowadays it almost feels more surprising on a day where someone doesn’t test the portal waters on a random Tuesday.

A big accelerator in the portal’s usage is probably NIL. NIL officially started on July 1, 2021, which is where the numbers on the graph above start to increase. It made it to where players weren’t only transferring to see if they could play elsewhere but how much they might be paid elsewhere.

All the roster movement has, in turn, made things tougher to predict.

Take this offseason for example. It’s hard enough keeping up with who is even on OSU’s team with the influx of transfers, much less forming a prediction has to how all of these new players are going to come together relative to all the players every other team is bringing in. I’ve never felt like I know less about TCU (random non-OSU Big 12 team) in the offseason than I do now.

Predictions are still a ton of fun, and I can’t wait to see where the Cowboys are projected to finish in 2025. But while this Wild West NIL era exists, it’s probably fair to say that these predictions mean even less than they once did.