Big 12 Games I'm Monitoring
We're only 2 weeks into the season, and we've already seen the Big 12 lay some major eggs. Pending some ACC chaos it is looking like we will once again be a one bid league this year.
I ran through record projections for SP+ based on the latest ratings from Bill Connelly and here's what the league looks like:
There's 5 teams with 8+ wins projected:
- Texas Tech - 9.2
- Utah - 8.9
- TCU - 8.4
- Iowa State - 8.2
- BYU 8.0
There's a couple in the 7s (Kansas, Arizona, Houston) that could play spoiler, but let's focus on the round robin of those top 5. Fun for the Cougars, we should have the exact opposite problem that we had last year with SOS being a factor in the CCG determination, because we are so blessed to play all 4 of the other teams. However that may make some tie breakers even more complicated depending on how those things shake out because there isn't a lot of round robin available for tied groups.
The only other games between these teams are a Utah vs Texas Tech matchup on 9/20 and TCU vs Iowa State on 11/8.
Looking at the average SP+ rating of conference opponents, we see that Arizona and Houston have the easiest conference slate (as of today), Arizona could be the BYU of last year - bad year last season, started with low expectations, but looks like they could make some noise. They only play BYU and Iowa State so could easily find themselves in the "7-2 praying for things to break their way" category this year.
| Team | Rating | Avg Opp |
|---|---|---|
| Houston | 6.7 | 7.13 |
| Arizona | 8.9 | 7.18 |
| Baylor | 7.0 | 7.3 |
| UCF | 6.5 | 7.71 |
| Iowa State | 13.5 | 7.9 |
| TCU | 15.1 | 7.98 |
| Kansas | 10.4 | 7.99 |
| Texas Tech | 17.3 | 8.01 |
| Utah | 17.1 | 8.26 |
| Oklahoma State | -4.2 | 8.82 |
| Cincinnati | 3.1 | 9.58 |
| Kansas State | 8.5 | 10.25 |
| Arizona State | 6.5 | 10.3 |
| BYU | 14.4 | 10.4 |
| Colorado | 5.9 | 10.77 |
| West Virginia | 3.7 | 11.38 |
The other thing that sticks out this year: good hell Oklahoma State is bad bad. The Pokes have to be moving on from Mike Gundy after this year and it feels like they may be in a race with some other schools int he region to grab GJ Kinne from Texas State.
The Cougars look like they're going to have a tough road to Arlington, but because of the SOS they should come out ahead in a lot of the weird scenarios where we got left out last year.