Big 12 bigger even after losing two national champs, newcomer Utah is league’s highest-ranked team

The Big 12 has gotten bigger even after the departures of two national champions, with a westward expansion and a “Prime” addition among the league’s four newcomers.

Mike Gundy is going into his 20th season as 17th-ranked Oklahoma State coach and has been part of all the Big 12’s configurations. There was the original 12-team setup, then 10 teams with round-robin schedules before 14 last year and now 16 with additions from the dismembered Pac-12 at the same time Red River rivals Oklahoma and Texas left for the SEC.

“As we move forward, there’s going to be a lot of parity. I should say more parity in college football than there has been over the last few years,” said Gundy, whose Cowboys were Big 12 runners-up last season. “I think that we’ve got a number of teams in this league that have an opportunity to make a move nationally. Whether anybody can take over and dominate for an extended period of time would be hard to tell at this point.”

Fourth-ranked Texas, the 2005 national champ, is gone after bookend Big 12 titles — in the inaugural 1996 season and its fourth last year to make the College Football Playoff. Only No. 16 Oklahoma has more, winning the league in 14 of the 28 seasons.

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Newcomer Utah, with coach Kyle Whittingham also in his 20th season, is the league’s highest-ranked team in The Associated Press Top 25 preseason poll. The No. 12 Utes return quarterback Cam Rising, a seventh-year senior who missed last season recovering from a knee injury.

This is the fourth league for Whittingham with the Utes. He was part of their WAC days as an assistant, and has been in the Mountain West, Pac-12 and now Big 12 as head coach.

“It’s a transition we made before, although when we went to the Pac-12, we were a G5 school trying to come up a level, which there was a little bit of a curve there that we had to endure,” he said. “We feel like we’ve got a good roster right now, one through 85, and ready to compete in this league.”

Original Big 12 member Colorado returns after 13 seasons in the Pac-12 that included only two winning records. The Buffaloes are going into their second season with Deion Sanders as their coach. They lost eight of their last nine games after a 3-0 start for Coach Prime, who has reloaded through the portal again this season.

Rounding out the league

No. 18 Kansas State, No. 22 Kansas, Baylor, Iowa State, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech have been part of the Big 12 throughout its entire history. TCU and West Virginia joined in 2012, after a two-year span when the league lost Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas A&M.

No. 21 Arizona and Arizona State arrived from the Pac-12 with Colorado and Utah.

BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF all had losing records in their Big 12 debuts last season. They were a combined 8-28 in conference play, with only four of those wins against teams outside that quartet.

Ollie and other runners

All-America running back Ollie Gordon II, who led the nation with 1,732 yards rushing and 21 touchdowns last season for Oklahoma State, is one of six 1,000-yard rushers back in the Big 12.

Texas Tech’s Tahj Brooks ranked fourth nationally with 1,538 yards and UCF’s RJ Harvey was sixth with 1,416 yards. The other returning 1,000-yard rushers are Kansas’ Devin Neal (1,280 yards, 16 TDs), Kansas State’s DJ Giddens (1,226 yards) and Cincinnati’s Corey Kiner (1,047 yards).

New Big 12 QBs

Shedeur Sanders went from Jackson State to Colorado with his dad, and threw for 3,230 yards with 27 touchdowns and three interceptions. Noah Fifita, a third-year sophomore at Arizona, set a school record completing 72.4% of his passes for 2,869 yards and 25 TDs.

Rising is back in the Big 12, where he redshirted as a freshman at Texas in 2018 before going to Utah.

UCF’s KJ Jefferson and Baylor’s Dequan Finn are dual-threat QBs who transferred into the Big 12 after five seasons elsewhere. Jefferson threw for 7,911 yards and 67 TDs and ran for 1,876 yards and 21 TDs in 44 games for Arkansas. Finn accounted for 8,914 yards (7,074 passing/1,840 rushing) and 88 scores (63 passing/25 rushing) at Toledo.

Notable games

Arizona plays its first Big 12 game at Kansas State on Friday, Sept. 13. Utah’s conference opener — after an earlier game against Baylor that won’t count in the standings — is Sept. 21 at Oklahoma State.

The Sunflower State showdown Oct. 26 could match top quarterbacks Jalon Daniels for Kansas and Avery Johnson for K-State. BYU is at Utah on Nov. 9, the first time their Holy War is a conference game since the Mountain West days of 2010, before BYU went independent for 12 seasons.

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