Last season was the first time since 2013 the Big 12 wasn’t the highest-ranked conference in college basketball per KenPom, as several teams were coming off a year where their talent cycle peaked and/or dealt with unexpected attrition/injuries. Baylor and Kansas spent most of the year at or near the top of most advanced metrics (KenPom, Torvik, etc.) but behind them was a gaggle of solid but flawed teams and bringing up the rear were teams who were disappointing in myriad ways. It was a down year for most of the conference, but that is not the case this year. By my count, at least half of the conference should be as good or better than they were last year with a couple more teams having potential for significant improvement. Being .500 or better in this conference should be a harder achievement than it was last year; for example, if you took this year’s version of Texas, Texas Tech, or West Virginia and put them in last year’s conference they’re probably winning more games than they did. I expect the Big 12 will be back on top of the conference rankings this season, perhaps by a fair margin. Being mediocre is going to get a couple of teams dunked into the upper mantle by the best squads. Say a tiny prayer your favorite squad isn’t in that demo.
The silver lining is that between the increased reliance on conference results due to COVID-shortened non-conference play and the increased quality of the Big 12, even if your favorite team finishes sixth or seventh they have a solid shot of making March Madness. While finishing in the bottom half of the Big 12 isn’t ideal, it probably isn’t a back-breaker for a team’s NCAA Tournament hopes. I wouldn’t be surprised if six Big 12 teams make it into the tourney and I’d say seven was plausible if Oklahoma State was eligible. I expect the top 3-4 teams in the conference will be in the conversation for a protected seed through most of the season, and any team in the top half isn’t sweating Selection Sunday. You know, assuming they can get through a full season of basketball. Personally, I would enjoy not having to refresh Bracket Matrix every six hours for the entirety of February & March, so maybe Texas could do me a solid for the first time in a half-decade and win 10+ games in conference play.
The Tiers
(teams listed alphabetically in each tier)
Tier 1
Nobody
I know who is supposed to be here, but this is my newsletter and the great thing about working for free is I’m allowed to be petty whenever I feel like it.
Tier 2
zBaylor Bears
Baylor is clearly the brrrghghg….let me try that again.
Baylor is clearly the besfffffffffaaaahh I can do this I can do this come on.
Baylor is clearly the best teawooga! Hummina Hummina Bazooing! Dammit, one more time.
BaylorIsTheBestTeamInTheConferenceThisYear oh god why is 2020 so awful? There’s a pandemic, we’re being blitzed with political ads for months at a time, everybody hates each other, and it’s like god looked at all of this and decided kick the Old Testament action up a notch by making Scott Drew the Big 12 coach most likely to win a national title right before the floods kick off. Baylor is going to start the year ranked no lower than #2, which is coincidentally the number of what I would do on Scott Drew’s windshield if I could sync up my morning coffee with his commute. I’m not above rigging up a harness that allows me to hang my ass over the I-35 lane they’re building for him and whatever former Art Briles assistants are in the area to use to get to and from campus and unleashing hell on his paint job. I’ve started a Chime account to build up my bail fund and have a dead-man timer on my Twitter account that will release a Venmo donation tweet if I’m in Waco for more than an hour without posting anything disparaging about Scott Drew. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
If you’ll excuse me, I have to install Tik Tok so I can convince the Chinese government’s Winnie the Pooh lookalike leader that Scott Drew is a Uyghur. Anyway, even with Tristan Clark retiring for medical reasons they’re the favorites.
Tier 3
Kansas Jayhawks
The talk about Kansas this year has been…oddly quiet? Are they legitimate underdogs this year, or at least as much of an underdog as a blue blood program can be? The answer is, uhh, only in the way a team who wins the Big 12 nearly every season could ever be. They’re definitely not the favorites to win this season, in part because Baylor is shudder really good and in part because the Jayhawks may not have the massive advantage of Phog Allen they normally enjoy. Kansas sent out an email to ticket holders telling them to expect a max capacity of around 1,500 this year, with less than half of those being students. Phog at 10% capacity isn’t the same behemoth that rattles opposing teams and refs, and the 7-2 or 8-1 home record Bill Self has counted on to propel his teams to conference titles could be harder to attain this season. While other schools will be dealing with something similar, the marginal decline for Kansas could be steeper than most in a season where they’re searching for how to replace the lost productivity of Devon Dotson and guaranteed dunk Udoka Azuibuike. As always, Kansas has plenty of talent. Marcus Garrett and Ochai Ogbaji will perform well and redshirt freshman Dajuan Harris should see the floor often, and David McCormack would be the best big on most schools in the country; the roster Kansas is running will lend itself more to a 4-out style than Self generally likes, but ironically is how some of his best recent squads have shined. While Kansas will be an underdog by Kansas standards and they aren’t the conference favorite for the first time since I voluntarily bought a 4-cylinder Civic under the delusion I wouldn’t miss having a V6 - that car got traded in six months later as I learned a very expensive depreciation lesson about buying a car you don’t love - they’re still unlikely to fall below fourth this year under any realistic scenario. Second seems the most likely place, with first and third being about equally likely in my eyes.
P.S. That Civic can spend all of eternity struggling up San Francisco hills for all I care; you were boring and your stereo was terrible. If you were a color, you were a beige that faded due to all the extra time you spent in the sun not getting to your destination in a timely manner. I hope you’re getting driven by a teenager who is being punished by their parents for calling players ethnic slurs on Xbox Live. I bet your backseat smells like failure and self-loathing.
Texas Longhorns
Alright, let’s do this.
*pours a stiff drink*
The amount of hype Texas is going to have this year is going to vary significantly; the advanced metrics will love them to start the year because they return everyone from last year, and when I say everyone I mean
Bart Torvik’s site has Texas #1 in the country for this exact reason, he loves continuity and upperclassmen and boy howdy do the Longhorns have those stacked higher than Tom Herman’s ego. If the returning players make even a normal amount of progress from their levels last year Texas is going to show a good amount of improvement, and then you add in a consensus 5-star talent like Greg Brown and it’s not hard to start picturing how things could go. If Matt Coleman plays like the all-conference player he was tabbed to be by the coaches this preseason, Andrew Jones regains his top form, and Greg Brown is even close to his highlight reels, Texas has maybe its best shot at contending for the Big 12 title in nearly a decade. This is the first Texas team in a long time where I can remember starters being sent to the bench not because they’re failing but because the depth of talent is forcing them into a reserve role. Consider that Texas has a 5-star McDonald’s All-American senior with two years of eligibility left getting reinserted to the starting lineup and he’s here because of cancer, where in a more normal timeline he’s probably in his second year in the NBA. They have a 5-star sophomore center who is having to work his ass off for the chance at cracking 12 minutes per game because they unexpectedly got back a center who was performing at an all-Big 12 level before a back injury derailed his plans of testing the NBA waters. Like, there’s a lot of happenstance that’s led to this team being so damn deep.
So why am I not pushing them as a Kansas (much less Baylor) challenger yet? I mean, other than I wrote an article calling for Shaka’s job. Well, let’s talk about the staff; K.T. Turner is a good recruiter but I’m not sure what his role is. (I don’t mean this as a slight on Turner, but getting specific info out of Smart’s practices is like getting blood from a stone..a stone that’s actively rolling away from you and laying spike strips behind itself.) Neill Berry has interesting offensive ideas, but the last two years have had significant stretches where the execution was lacking or the adjustments to Big 12 defenses were too slow in coming. Maybe this is where Nevada Smith comes into play as he’s a former NBA G League head coach and could be taking on some of those responsibilities off the court, who knows because rolling stone etc. That would mean Neill Berry is just what, recruiting and writing playcalls on a dry erase board during the game?
As for Smart, we have a long enough history of results that I think two things are fairly reasonable statements:
The 11-win season was an aberration
Expecting a vast departure from a .500 record in conference play is unlikely most years
Remove the 11-22 season and Smart’s conference record through four seasons is a combined 36-36. He’s shown that he’s thus far a coach who sits somewhere near 9-9 in conference play, so I’m setting that as the baseline for a ‘normal’ season until proven otherwise. This team on paper should exceed that, but we’ve seen that “on paper” versus “on the floor” have spent too many games over the last five years being mutually exclusive. This could be the year where Texas makes the Venn Diagram of their season look more like a circle and less like a six-year-old drawing boobs with a protractor, in which case they might get up to second in conference. I don’t see Texas dropping below sixth in conference play, but I guess I should say that comes with a caveat that they’re not down to six scholarship players at any point and nobody gets cancer.
Texas Tech Red Raiders
Texas Tech has one of the widest range of possible outcomes in the conference standings, as they could be a title contender if Mac McClung’s waiver gets approved (which just happened) and a guy like Terrence Shannon Jr makes a Jarrett Culver-like leap. The pessimistic view: they could fall into the next tier if neither of those things happen, Marcus Santos-Silva doesn’t expand his range beyond the paint, and they can’t find somebody to take on the ‘nearly-guaranteed clutch free throws’ role of departed Davide Moretti. The defense should be stout as always, but last season showed the slog Red Raiders basketball can be if the offense isn’t helping out. Chris Beard (and Mark Adams) have shown they can reliably build great defenses, but the offensive end is a bit more of a mixed bag, especially when they’re lacking a lottery pick or supremely-clutch point guard. McClung and Shannon could provide the spark that gets them into the top two or three of the conference, the floor is somewhere around seventh if things go south. This is a likely tourney team with the possibility of playing for a protected seed if they really get cooking.
West Virginia Mountaineers
West Virginia is going to get a lot of hype as a ‘dark horse’ Big 12 contender from sentient Excel spreadsheets like Jon Rothstein who think picking a team likely to start the season in the top 15 is going out on a limb, and the Mountaineers make a compelling case. This squad is going to rebound every basketball within a zip code of Morgantown and they’re going to send bigs at their opponents in waves. Going into the paint against this front line will be a risk/reward calculation like few others in D-I basketball, and there will be games where they bully teams into submission. If I could remember Texas playing in Morgantown more than once in the last three years I might have good examples for you, but since those games never happened THEY *NEVER* HAPPENED BUDDY I’ll refer you to the 81-49 beatdown they put on TCU in January. The ceiling (and floor) is going to be defined by their guard play; West Virginia made a Jacob Young-like 26.4% of their threes in conference play. (I just looked it up and Young has made 26.7% of his threes in his career, and his best season was at Texas, so pardon me if I watch Carsen Edwards Youtube highlights like Nicholas Cage in ‘8MM’.) The Mountaineers brought in JuCo transfer Kedrian Johnson to hopefully help share the perimeter scoring load with guys like Brandon Knapper, Jordan McCabe, and Miles McBride, and if they can bring the outside shooting up to a respectable level then the Mountaineers are primed to contend for the conference title. If they can’t, teams can collapse on Derek Culver & Oscar Tshiebwe and the going will get tough. The ceiling for the Mountaineers is a Big 12 title, the floor around sixth. Missing out on a March Madness bid would be a big disappointment for this team.
Tier 4
Oklahoma Sooners
Point: Since their Final Four run, Oklahoma has been 29-43 in the Big 12
Counterpoint: Their conference record has improved every year
Point: Since their Final Four run, Lon Kruger hasn’t won a conference tournament game
Counterpoint: They had a good shot at ending that streak when COVID hit
Point: Oklahoma had 2 commits this year, with neither being particularly sought after
Counterpoint: They landed some JuCo talent who could contribute immediately
I begin the Oklahoma section this way because I’m pretty unsure how to feel about this squad; on one hand they’re not hugely different from the team which tied three other teams for third at 9-9 in conference play, and on the other hand they bring back most of that squad (Kristian Doolittle being a significant exception) and are likely to see better seasons from Austin Reaves and De’Vion Harmon along with Kur Kuath continuing to progress while Brady Manek completes the most redneck mustache in the history of Oklahoma basketball, hitting 40% from three and fulfilling his destiny as less-likeable trailer park Larry Bird. Umoja Gibson getting his waiver probably helps their shooting as well. I could see Oklahoma making a jump and competing for a top-half conference finish, but I could just as easily see them struggling to deal with a resurgent Big 12 and scuffling about for seventh place.
I’m quietly curious if Lon Kruger is getting bored in Norman. This will be his tenth season with the Sooners, the longest he’s been at any one school. Prior to Oklahoma he was generally known as a guy who could get your school to the NCAA Tournament (no coach in D-I history has taken more schools dancing) but he would head off into the sunset after a few years; maybe he’s happy in Oklahoma, and getting older has subdued his penchant for wandering off for greener pastures. Maybe things are getting a bit stale, the recruiting the last couple of years doesn’t look to me like a guy who is building for another Final Four run but rather trying to keep his head above water. Maybe - and I’m just spitballing here, I have no inside info to back this up - he would be interested in returning to Kansas State if they moved on from Bruce Weber. Kansas State would only be on the hook for $2m if they got rid of Weber after this season and Lon Kruger not only played for K-State but was an assistant coach there. Maybe he’d be open to ending his career where it started? If I were the Wildcats, I’d kick the tires on a reinvigorated Kruger at his alma mater. He’s definitely a better coach than the guy who hasn’t won a NCAA Tourney game other than the one run which was aided by a ridiculous string of upsets in their path. I’m definitely talking about Bruce Weber and not Shaka Smart right now. Probably.
Oklahoma State Cowboys
Cade Cunningham is legit; he will be the front-runner for Big 12 freshman of the year with a puncher’s chance at PotY, so if he goes ballistic in conference play the Cowboys could sneak into the next tier. The reason they aren’t there now is pretty simple: they were one of the worst three-point shooting teams in the country and their best two shooters graduated, they currently have exactly zero players who hit more than 12 threes last season. Cameron McGriff graduated and Yor Anei transferred so their best rebounders are gone as well, and while the Boone brothers showed promise in limited minutes that’s another big question. Cunningham is really good, but he’s just one guy. Isaac Likekele is going to need to consistently contribute off the ball and the freshmen are probably going to have to come up big across the board if the Cowboys are going to end up in the top half of the conference. I would put their ceiling at fourth and floor around eighth, though dropping below seventh seems unlikely unless Cunningham gets injured or the team quits near the end of the year with no March Madness to play for. Boynton’s seat may start getting warm if that happens, though he’s been surprisingly Teflon so far so maybe the Cowboys fandom has more patience than I realize.
Tier 5
Iowa State Cyclones
If the Cyclones could keep their talent from turning pro early, they would conceivably roll out a lineup this year of Lindell Wigginton, Tyrese Halliburton, Talen Horton-Tucker, and Cameron Lard in their starting lineup. That would be a really interesting team that would rank significantly higher than this one. Iowa State has some talent, guys like Rasir Bolton, Solomon Young, and George Conditt IV are good players; it just seems as though the talent level at Iowa State has been trending slowly downward as Steve Prohm’s tenure has worn on and the Fred Hoiberg players have graduated. Cyclones fans are getting restless; Prohm had a season where he went 9-9 sandwiched by a pair of seasons where they finished 9th & 10th in the Big 12. Iowa State fans are passionate about basketball and they’ll reluctantly abide a clunker of a season once in a blue moon if the overall trajectory of the program is heading the right way, but Prohm isn’t showing that trajectory. What’s working for him is a concept you may be familiar with and/or rage-tweeted about elsewhere: his contract. It runs through 2025 and he’s owed half the remaining money if he’s fired without cause. That’s around $5.1m after this season if my math is right, so…yea, sorry @WideRightNattyLight. This seems like a team more likely to miss the NCAA Tournament than make it, which means they’re more likely to be between seventh and ninth than anything.
Kansas State Wildcats
This is going to be Bruce Weber’s ninth season in Manhattan, and he’s spent approximately 1/3 of those seasons on the hot seat. The more I think about it, I may be underselling that percentage; there have been maybe three seasons where nobody was after his ass and two of them happened in the last three years. I’ve spoken of my theory that Bruce Weber isn’t really happy unless his seat is a smidgen below broiling, and if so this could be a good transitional year for him because the Elite Eight appearance is falling further in the rear view mirror and this current roster is more potential than actual. KenPom color-codes stats from dark red to bright green and the Wildcats’ offensive ledger is a giant bruise; Xavier Sneed, Cartier Diarra, and Makol Maiwen are all gone so this team is going to need Dajuan Gordon, Mike Mcguirl, and David Sloan to be the best version of themselves if the Wildcats want to stay out of the cellar for a second year. I may be underrating their freshmen - it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done so - but higher than seventh seems like a reach.
TCU Horned Frogs
Jamie Dixon has undeniably improved TCU from a perennial doormat to a team that can occasionally take a bite out of an upper-tier Big 12 program, which is something nobody else has done in Fort Worth in 40 years or so. He’s made the Horned Frogs into more than a couple of guaranteed wins for half the conference and he’s flirted with March Madness a couple of times, making it once as a six-seed. His offenses can be very hard to defend and he’s better at finding underrated shooters than most coaches. That said, they are better described as a program who can’t really afford player defections and there are currently 13 players on their Verbal Commits depth chart which are listed as departing as transfers or the ever-ambiguous ‘left team for personal reasons’. That tends to leave a lot of holes to fill, and Jamie Dixon is hammering the transfer market harder than anyone not named Chris Beard. He has more redshirt players than a Star Trek death scene and it’s possible the motley crew of players he’s put together could replace the Bane-sized hole in his production. (Whether it’s Desmond Bane or Batman Bane-sized is immaterial, they’re the same size person and they’ve both murdered the dreams of thousands of enemies.) RJ Nembhard sounds like the guy you wanted to lose every 1980s John Hughes film but he’s vital to the team’s success this year. Jaedone LeDee was a highly sought high school prospect who didn’t quite work out at Ohio State and has looked 24 since he was 17. Souleymane Doumbia is a very athletic big who went the JuCo route to start his college career. If Dixon can get them all clicking, the offense should be reasonably dangerous; if he doesn’t, this year could be tougher than explaining blockchain to your grandparents over Zoom Thanksgiving Dinner. Maybe Dixon gets things going enough they challenge for seventh or so, but 8th through 10th seem more likely.
My Dumb Conference Prediction
I bet I get at least six of those wrong. This order is contingent upon Mac McClung getting his waiver approved and he shows out; if he doesn’t live up to expectations, you can put Texas, Texas Tech, & West Virginia in a bag, shake them up, and place them in any order and I probably wouldn’t argue much. I might give the slightest nod to Texas & West Virginia over a McClung-less Tech squad, but there’s still not a ton of daylight between these teams.
Texas’ conference schedule
*pours another stiff drink*
This conference season is going to be extremely weird for very obvious COVID reasons. Schools are planning capacity limits which might make every road game feel like a Texas home game /rimshot and could lend itself to some unusual results. I spoke about Kansas and the Phog being significantly different, which also means the refereeing could be significantly different. (Kansas players could get called for traveling. IN LAWRENCE!) If Texas is going to make a run at a conference title, they probably need to win at least 13 games to at least be in the discussion. To do that, they’re going to need to take more than one out of four against Baylor and Kansas and they likely need to win five out of six against Iowa State, Kansas State, and TCU. If they do manage 2-2 against BU/KU and 5-1 against ISU/KSU/TCU, that has them at 7-3 with 8 games left against OU/OSU/Tech/WVU. 6-2 against that crew gets them there, but that means they’re sweeping at least two of those four. That’s four or five sweeps in a season for a program that has swept five conference opponents in the last three seasons. Am I sufficiently illustrating the effort that first or second in the conference will take relative to Texas’ recent past?
If Texas does anything less than 5-2 in that stretch from the January 5th home game against Iowa State to the January 26th home game against Oklahoma, their conference title aspirations are probably cooked. If this was a non-COVID situation, I would pencil this schedule in as 11-7 or so; with the games taking more of a neutral court or Texas NIT home game vibe /double rimshot I could maybe talk myself into 12-6 or 13-5 if Texas is really reaching their ceiling, but that’s still very much a best-case scenario. 11-7 or 10-8 feel like the fat part of the Bell curve to me; anything above means we’re having fun, and anything below means we’re dealing with 80% of the internet comments discussing if Gregg Marshall is still too big of an asshole after we hired Urban Meyer to recruit Aaron Hernandez clones for four years before faking a heart attack as the NCAA shows up in Austin to check out why all of our players have dedicated trust fund managers. You know, normal, very healthy Texas fan stuff. Our fanbase always keeps it interesting.
The apparent rotation, from BON:
Smart listed Brown among the top six players in the rotation, but said he doesn’t know which five will start against the Vaqueros. The other players in that group are senior point guard Matt Coleman, junior guard Courtney Ramey, junior guard Andrew Jones, sophomore forward Kai Jones, and senior forward Jericho Sims.
Be petty all you want. Baylor/Scott Drew suck. I would give up a lot, including my manhood, to see Texas knock off Baylor twice this season. And kudos for the Gary Oldman "Leon: Professional" clip.