With Week 0 almost here, college football is back on the calendar, and preseason rankings are still doing what they always do: stirring up arguments before a single snap has been played. One of the latest comes from The Athletic’s Chris Vannini, who released a full 138-team FBS preseason ranking and gave the Big 12 plenty to chew on.
At the top of the league, the conference comes out looking strong. Seven Big 12 teams cracked the top 30, which is a hefty chunk of the league and, as the source material notes, more than double the ACC’s total of three.
Texas Tech sits highest among the Big 12 at No. 9, followed by BYU at No. 11 and Houston at No. 19.
Oklahoma State comes in at No. 22, with Utah just behind at No. 26.
TCU checks in at No. 27 and Arizona at No. 28, giving the league a deep cluster of teams near the top of the board.
That Oklahoma State placement is notable because the Cowboys are being viewed as a trendy team in part because of what Eric Morris has brought in from North Texas. The top end of the Big 12, then, is not just crowded - it’s getting real attention.
The middle of the rankings is where things get a little more debatable. Arizona State lands at No.
45, Kansas State at No. 46, and Baylor at No. 55.
The source material says Kansas State is rated higher there than it would be, while Baylor is the one that really jumps off the page. That No. 55 slot appears to assume the DJ Lagway experiment works out in Waco; if it doesn’t, Baylor would be looking at a much lower spot.
A second tier follows with West Virginia at No. 63, UCF at No.
69, Cincinnati at No. 70, Kansas at No. 74 and Colorado at No.
- Among that group, Cincinnati is described as a little too high, with the view that the Bearcats could wind up worse than Iowa State but not ahead of both Kansas and Colorado.
At the bottom of the Big 12 list is Iowa State at No. 98, and that ranking comes with a clear warning about the challenge ahead for Jimmy Rogers after the major roster turnover from Matt Campbell leaving. The source leaves room for the possibility that Iowa State is the league’s weakest team on a talent basis, but not by such a wide margin that it should be more than 20 spots behind the next-worst Big 12 team.
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