CBS Sports analyst and host of Inside College Basketball, John Rothstein, stirred up plenty of reaction with his latest Big 12 basketball power rankings on social media, and Baylor fans had reason to bristle.
Rothstein placed the Bears 10th in the conference, a spot that feels awfully low for a Scott Drew program that has already started reshaping its roster for the upcoming season.
Baylor’s 2025 season was rough enough to keep the Bears out of the top tier of the league, but ranking them this far down ignores the work Drew has done in the offseason. The Bears have added real talent through the transfer portal after losing two stars, Tounde Yessoufou to the portal and Cameron Carr to the NBA Draft.
That influx matters even more because Baylor also kept seven players from last season, a sharp contrast to the previous offseason when the program retained none. That blend of continuity and new faces gives this team a much different look heading into the year.
There is also unfinished business in the recruiting market. Drew is still pursuing top-40 guard Tyrone Jamison, which only adds to the sense that Baylor’s roster picture is not done taking shape.
The names already in the mix - Dylan Mingo, Isaac Celiscar, and Kayden Mingo - are enough to give the Bears a real case for climbing higher than 10th in the Big 12 pecking order.
The ranking looks even more questionable when stacked against some of the teams ahead of Baylor. West Virginia finished conference play at 9-9 last season, better than the Bears’ 6-12 mark, and the Mountaineers also went on to win the college basketball crown while Baylor fell short in the same postseason tournament. Baylor did beat West Virginia on the road, but the overall body of work still left the Mountaineers ahead in the league race.
Oklahoma State is another team that landed alongside Baylor in the same 6-12 neighborhood last season, yet the Cowboys have not exactly made a major offseason splash either.
And while Baylor’s 2025 season was a disappointment, it stands out more as an outlier than a trend. Over the last 10 years, Scott Drew’s teams have reached the NCAA tournament far more often than West Virginia and Oklahoma State combined, with Baylor missing the field only once in that span.
It is still early, and these are preseason rankings with rosters still in motion. Big 12 basketball is notoriously hard to sort out before the games begin. But for a Baylor team that has already added talent, kept more of its roster intact, and still has room to improve, 10th feels like a number that may not hold up for long.
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