Big 12 is the heartland of college hoops
Baylor-Kansas on Saturday is the headliner.
On Saturday afternoon, the past two NCAA basketball champions meet in Allen Field House, the best college arena in America. And, after Saturday, Baylor and Kansas could meet twice more, in the Big 12 tournament and then maybe deep into the NCAAs.
Or they could get bounced from the league event and then sent home on the first NCAA weekend. College basketball has been flattened by early entries, G-League Ignite and rampant transfers. It is no longer news when the top-ranked team loses, because the wire-service polls are an anachronism and so, regrettably, is the regular season. There are two dozen teams, at least, who can see themselves cutting the nets in Houston, without fantaszing.
At least five of those teams are from the Big 12, including Kansas, which edged North Carolina to win it all last year, and Baylor, which blew out previously-unbeaten Gonzaga in the 2021 Final. Not bad for a conference that is unable to count its own membership. When Missouri and Texas A&M left the Big 12, the league obviously couldn’t become the Other Big 10, and it turned down the suggestion to became the Hateful Eight Plus Two. It stuck with the status quo, and now will be rewarded when Texas and Oklahoma leave in 2024 and Brigham Young, Houston, Cincinnati and Central Florida come aboard this fall. At this point the Big 14 will exist for one uncomfortable season before normalcy returns.
Despite all that, the Big 12 is several miles away ahead of every other league, and has been for three seasons now.
In the KenPom analytical ratings, eight Big 12 teams are in the top 25 and everyone is ranked in the Top 62.
In the NCAA NET rankings, which the selection committee prizes, the whole conference is in the top 65 and the 65th team is Oklahoma, which disassembled second-ranked Alabama, 93-69, on Jan. 28.
Back to the KenPoms, six Big 12 teams are ranked in the top 22 in defensive efficiency, with Iowa State leadng the way at No. 8.
And when you look at the quality of losses, the Big 12’s depth shines through. Its teams have lost only 10 times to teams that aren’t in Quad 1, the top echelon in the 363-team membership of Division I. The Big 10, the second-ranked conference, has lost 42 games to such also-rans. Pac-12 teams have 68 losses of that kind, and ACC teams have 80.
Charisma? The Big 12 manages to win without it. Its teams don’t run very often, with only three of them ranked in KenPom’s top 100 for tempo. Their campuses are in Waco and Ames and the Kansas version of Manhattan, known as the Little Apple. They live a long way from South Beach and Hollywood and The Loop, and, culturally, their part of the world is still football-obsessed.
How has this happened?
Fran Fraschilla, who has been analyzing Big 12 games for ESPN for a generation now, points to the confluence of coaching and stability.
Before Texas fired Chris Beard, the Big 12 had four coaches who had taken their teams to Final Fours in the past five touranaments: Scott Drew with Baylor in 2021, Bill Self with Kansas last season, Beard with Texas Tech in 2019 and Oklahoma coach Porter Moser with Loyola Chicago in 2018. Bob Huggins has done the same with Cincinnati and West Virginia.
Everyone in the league except Oklahoma State’s Mike Boynton and Kansas State’s first-year coach Jerome Tang, a former Baylor assistant, had been a head coach in Division I before his current gig. Huggins and Jamie Dixon (TCU) are coaching their alma maters. Rodney Terry, who is prospering as Beard’s interim replacement, coached Fresno State and UTEP before comng to Texas.
The league also has a clearly identifiable villain. Until 2019, Kansas had won or shared the Big 12 regular season title 14 consecutive times. The Jayhawks are the constant, the only program that can count on signing five-star players and the main one that runs the risk of losing freshmen to the NBA. When you have a tyrant like that, its visits to your arena become major events, and when you vanquish such a tyrant it’s a landmark.
And because there are only 10 teams, it’s possible to play an 18-game conference round-robin that guarantees that everyone plays everyone twice. “I never thought Baylor-Kansas would be a hot rivalry,” Fraschilla said, “but they see each other twice, and the team that loses the first one (as Kansas did) has a powerful incentive to get it back.”
It makes for a grind in February, but all those battle ribbons can be significant in March. Kansas and Baylor have all suffered three-game losing streaks in conference play.
Last year Iowa State went 7-11 in conference play, got into the NCAA tournament anyway, and knocked off LSU and Wisconsin to make the Sweet 16. A chief enabler was all-star freshman Tyreese Hunter. Then Hunter skipped town for Texas. Coach T.J. Ozelberger, who had been an assistant in Ames before he took head coaching jobs at South Dakota State and UNLV, just shrugged and found more transfers, and Iowa State is 14th in the NET ratings with wins over Baylor, Kansas and North Carolina.
The Cyclones’ 2022 experience lends hope to West Virginia, which is 4-9 in the league but 15-11 overall, only losing to Purdue and Xavier on the outside. In the midst of all that, West Virginia beat Auburn as part of the Big 12’s 7-3 blitz of the SEC in an inter-conference “challenge.” The Mountaineers are 23th in the NET ratings.
The Big 12 has lost some headliners to early-entry drafts, such as Kevin Durant, Trae Young, Cade Cunningham, Joel Embiid and AndrewWiggins. “But for every one of those, you can point to a Buddy Hield or Frank Mason or Davonte Graham who have been developed over the long term,” Fraschilla said. “The SEC might have more pros prospects, but this is a mature league, and getting that extra Covid-19 year has contributed to that. But the coaches in this league are notorious for developing talent.”
Of the top 10 scorers in the league, only Keyonte George of Baylor and Gradey Dick of Kansas are freshmen, and seven have played college ball for at least four years. The top rebounder, Moussa Cisse of Oklahoma State, is a junior, and the top four assist men are seniors.
Indoor events can be particularly appealing when the wind comes whistling down the plain. Nevertheless, college basketball is played before acres of open seats in most places.In the Big 12, seven schools average over 9,300 for home games. Texas is averaging 10,434 but could have sold more tickets for its bigger games, since it downsized 2,500 seats from the Erwin Center to the new Moody Center.
The future is a mist, although Fraschilla says the Big 12 should be content with adding Houston and Cincinnati in exchange for the Longhorns and Sooners. Conference upheaval is not over, with Arizona and Arizona State waiting to see the next developments in the Former Pac-12.
But in case you miss Baylor-Kansas today, there are still a few weeks of Big 12 basketball left. It won’t be hard to discern. It’s the one with grown men, hard-earned buckets, and fans who don’t see a single thing wrong with college hoops, 2023.