Oklahoma St.
Texas Tech
Baylor
Houston
TCU
UCF
Cincinnati
BYU
Kansas
Kansas St.
Iowa State
West Virginia

Go back a couple of months back to ago before Texas and Oklahoma announced they were moving to the SEC. What would your reaction be to BYU adding one on these teams to their 2026 schedule? For just about all of the above teams, my reaction would have been:

Good. We could use another middling P5 team on the schedule. It would add legitimacy to the schedule while still being a winnable game. Some games might be a little more exciting than others, but those would most likely be for personal or geographical reasons.

Case in point, which team would you be more excited to see on the schedule next year, USC or UTSA? UTSA is a conference champion that won 12 games. USC won just 4.

The obvious answer is USC.

Even this year. Everyone talks about BYU going 5-0 vs the PAC 12. Yet no one mentions the second best team (At least according to all the polls) that BYU beat this season, MWC Champion Utah St. If you were to rank BYU's biggest victories of the season, where would that one rank?

I am very excited that BYU is finally in a P5 conference, but if we are being honest, the new Big 12 is the least prestigious P5 conference, despite having the most teams in the top 20 this year. The biggest reason for that is that they (or should I say "we") don't have any big name schools.

If you have any doubts about how other people view the programs that make up the new Big 12, look at recruiting rankings. The new Big 12 has ONE recruiting class in the top 40. The SEC has 14. In fact, the Big 12s highest recruiting class would have ranked 14th in the SEC.


Winning, however, cures all ills. While true, in this case it is incomplete. The Big 12 needs consistent winners and needs to get people into the national championship game. Look at Oregon. Before Mike Bellotti took over, Oregon was a nobody. Only 3 ranked seasons in in the prior century. Belloti had 7 ranked teams in 14 years, including a pair of PAC 10 championships. While now established as a B/B+ program, they were still not really on the national radar.

That changed in Chip Kelly's second year when the Ducks almost won the National Championship. That started a run of 4 top 4 finishes in 5 years. In the past 5 years, they has only 2 ranked seasons, but they are still considered a player on the national stage (if a notch below the true blue bloods). It wasn't that long ago that Oregon was ranked 3rd in the nation despite loosing to Stanford (who is 3-9).

The Big 12 needs someone to step up and be their "Oregon". Cincinnati right now looks to be a prime candidate. If they can knock off Alabama and retain their coach (both of which while possible, appear rather challenging) they might actually be able to make it.

After the Bearcats, it doesn't look good. Mike Gundy's Oklahoma State Cowboys have been consistently good, but have only one top ten finish in his 16 year run there. If they can recruit and develop an elite QB, they could make a push, but that would likely only last as long as the QB. If they can keep the QB long enough to get a noticable bump in recruiting, they may be able to make a run at becoming the Big 12's Oregon.

BYU and Baylor have slight chances, but they will

1) Have to retain most of their coaching talent long enough (and field teams good enough) to be perennial top 20 teams with regular top 10 incursions.
2) Have to use all of those wins to up their recruiting to annually reel in top 25 classes.
3) Have to find/develop and ride and elite QB into the playoffs and make some noise once there.

While unlikely they pathway is there and technically possible.

BYU will just have to step in and take it. For the good of the Conference of course 🙂