Kansas State Wildcats coach Jerome Tang was pretty frank with his description of the state of Big 12 men’s basketball Wednesday morning.
“We have great coaches, great coaches in the league. … [It’s] like the SEC with football—they have great coaches, and players want to play against the best,” Tang said. “In the Big 12, the guys we recruit want to play against the best. It’s not close. It’s not debatable.”
The league had already been the highest-rated conference on KenPom in seven of the previous nine seasons prior to the Houston Cougars’ addition last year. Houston immediately became the cream of the crop, winning the conference regular-season crown by two games. Another monster addition joins the fray this season, with perennial power and a preseason top-10 team in the Arizona Wildcats among four newcomers. What was already a monster of a hoops league is now bordering on superleague territory.
Five of the nation’s top 10 in the Associated Press preseason poll call the Big 12 home, including three in top five with the No. 1 Kansas Jayhawks, No. 4 Houston and No. 5 Iowa State Cyclones. In the more than 60-year history of the poll, that’s the first time that has happened. In KenPom’s rankings, eight of the league’s 16 teams rank 21st or higher. And the depth beyond that top tier is astounding, too.
The preseason No. 9 pick BYU Cougars feature a pair of projected first-round picks in the 2025 NBA draft (Egor Demin and Kanon Catchings), the No. 11 UCF Knights return two 15-point-per-game scorers (Jaylin Sellers and Darius Johnson) and add two more in the portal (Jordan
Ivy-Curry and Keyshawn Hall), while the No. 12 Arizona State Sun Devils signed two five-star freshmen out of high school (Jayden Quaintance and Joson Sanon) this spring. Every conference’s coaches can wax poetic about how there are no easy nights in their respective leagues, but no conference embodies that quite like the Big 12 right now.
“If you compare the middle of the league to the middle of other leagues or the bottom to the bottom of other leagues, it ain’t even close,” Cincinnati Bearcats coach Wes Miller said. “That night-in, night-out battle in our league, the level of basketball is just so high.”
“This league has no bottom,” Kansas head coach Bill Self said.
Just as SEC football can take over Saturdays with headliner matchups one after another, Big 12 basketball slates come conference play seem destined to do the same. Take the first full Saturday for the league on Jan. 4: Baylor and Iowa State face off in a top-10 showdown, BYU brings its NBA-bound freshmen to Houston to take on Kelvin Sampson’s team and Arizona hits the road to take on a Cincinnati team with significant preseason expectations. And that’s all on a day in which Kansas doesn’t play.
The four newcomers (Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Arizona State) all come from a high-major league in the Pac-12, but there’s little question this represents a step up in weight class … and perhaps not just figuratively. No word was used more regularly Wednesday than “physicality,” and matching the level that the likes of Houston and Iowa State bring to the table appears to be priority No. 1 for new programs joining the fray.
“It’s a different notch. All high-major basketball is physical, but certainly it’s a different level, and we like to say it’s big-boy basketball,” Utah coach Craig Smith said. “Expect the foul, not the call. The number of times our guys have heard that over the last eight months or whatever, it’s been a lot, but that’s just the truth.”
Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd added as much physicality in the portal as anyone, adding rebounding machines Trey Townsend (Oakland) and Tobe Awaka (Tennessee) to a group that already featured some chiseled bodies. While Lloyd says he’d have recruited that duo to the Pac-12, he emphasized it was “extremely important” to beef up ahead of the conference move.
“I like linebackers,” Lloyd joked.
A move to 20 league games starting this season only adds to the looming headaches as Big 12 coaches prep for the gauntlet ahead. Previously, the league had been one of the remaining holdouts playing an 18-game conference schedule. Now with 16 teams, it decided to move up to 20. Each team will play each other once and get five teams twice. Notable double-ups include two matchups each between preseason No. 1 Kansas and fellow top-five teams Houston and Iowa State.
“If somebody goes 15–5, I would go ‘Wow! They’ve had a heck of a year,’ ” Self said. “In the past, maybe you would have a team go 16–2. I don’t see that happening [this year].”
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has regularly stated his belief that college basketball is “undervalued” in the current media landscape and has doubled down on the sport since arriving at the league two years ago. He clearly has the product to back it up, and the league is positioned for dominance over the next half-decade as Yormark prepares for a major potential shift: selling media rights for basketball separately from football.
“The growth of basketball, I think we all see it,” Yormark said Tuesday. “It’s not just men’s, it’s women’s. You see those WNBA numbers, record Finals ratings. You saw that here last year in our tournament, in the NCAA tournament. I think there’s real upside, and I’m looking to capture as much of that, both short-term and long-term, as I can.”
There’s been plenty of turnover, both in schools (eight new members since the start of last year) and coaches. Just four coaches in the league have more than three years of Big 12 experience as head coaches. While the elder statesmen like Scott Drew and Self have long sung the league’s praises, even they acknowledge there’s a different feel entering this highly anticipated Big 12 campaign.
“I’ve said this a lot of times … that a particular year, it would be the hardest year to win it of any of the years that we’ve had,” Self said. “I can tell you hands down, this is going to be the hardest year to win our league.”
