These three schools all share the common trait of being fairly distantly removed from the biggest metro areas of the Big 12. Those major metro areas and talent hubs are, in order by population: Obviously D.C./Baltimore and Pittsburgh are irrelevant for everyone in the B12 save for West Virginia but they very much matter for … [Read more…]
Yesterday I compiled some data from 247sports.com on the recruiting class rankings of the Big 12 over the last decade (2010-19). Btw, that website is remarkably easy to use and a tremendous resource for doing quick research on most anything you could want to examine. What I compiled was the average class ranking for every … [Read more…]
Everyone should keep up over at Football Outsiders where I preview every week’s top six games and make picks against FEI’s projection model. This week I’ll have Bedlam and Farmageddon amongst the games that get previewed and picked. But I wanted to hit on a few different smaller topics around the league that I couldn’t … [Read more…]
There were only three games in the Big 12 this week, but all of them were pretty significant and a couple of them had lines that I thought were pretty silly heading into the week. Oklahoma and Baylor both -11 was a bit much and sure enough, neither covered although both pulled out some wins. … [Read more…]
The action is really starting to heat up in the Big 12 now. We got three particularly clarifying games in the second week of in-conference play and then a customary but likely satisfying (for the winner) blowout of the Kansas Jayhawks. The national scene was pretty interesting too. Mack Brown’s UNC nearly upset Clemson before … [Read more…]
Week 5 is the first real slate of Big 12 football games that will start to shape the conference race. Obviously Oklahoma State had a big chance in week 4 to catapult to the top of the league with a victory over Texas but I suspect that only people living in Oklahoma really thought that … [Read more…]
Over at Crimson and Cream Machine you can read an excerpt from my new book, “Flyover Football: How the Big 12 became the frontier for modern football.” The selection is from Chapter 9: Bob’s last gift and the no-D league. The chapter discusses how Stoops pushed the Big 12 forward with one final offensive hire … [Read more…]
Nickel became the standard “base defense” for the Big 12 sometime around the turn of the decade. Honestly I haven’t done the research to pinpoint the exact year but Texas went base nickel in 2008, Oklahoma State was starting Shaun Lewis as their “star” LB in 2010, and of course Oklahoma rolled in nickel as … [Read more…]
The other day I posted this thought on Twitter: So the tiers would look like this: Tier 1: Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa State Tier 2: Oklahoma State, TCU, Baylor, Texas Tech Tier 3: West Virginia, Kansas State 50 feet of crap… Kansas I got a good follow up question from Jay Jordan over at Cyclone Fanatic: … [Read more…]
Matt Wells’ Utah State program was defined largely by three things. First, the Kyle Whittingham-tree defense. Wells’ came up under Gary Andersen’s Utah State program and would hire more defensive coordinators from that tree, including Texas’ Todd Orlando. Most recently they brought in Keith Patterson, who’d worked in the 3-3-5 stack under Dana Holgorsen and … [Read more…]