Big 12 media days are supposed to be about the season ahead, but Day 2 in Frisco kept circling back to a few bigger storylines: Texas Tech, Cincinnati, Arizona and a brand-new look at Iowa State under Jimmy Rogers.
One of the more interesting scenes came away from the podium. On Tuesday morning, word surfaced that Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark had met with a group of Texas Tech officials at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse in Fort Worth.
The gathering included board members and boosters Cody Campbell and Dusty Womble, along with school president Lawrence Schovanec and athletic director Kirby Hocutt. The exact details of what was said over steak weren’t made public, but the meeting appeared to be aimed at smoothing things over after the Brendan Sorsby situation.
Whatever else was discussed - the future of the conference, the broader direction of college athletics - the tone looked more like a peace offering than a showdown. At least from the outside, it doesn’t seem as if the Big 12 has a Texas Tech problem.
Then Cincinnati coach Scott Satterfield went and reopened the Sorsby conversation. On Wednesday, he told The Athletic’s Chris Vannini that Texas Tech was one of several schools that may have “reached out” to Sorsby’s camp in an effort to get him to enter the transfer portal before the end of the 2025 season.
“We had already heard that schools had reached out - Texas Tech in particular had already reached out - with four games left,” Satterfield told The Athletic ’s Chris Vannini. “So we knew we wouldn’t be able to compete financially with that, so we’d started looking for quarterbacks.
… (After the season), he knew that if we tried to come up with money to pay him, we weren’t going to have enough for other positions. Wished him good luck, and that was it.”
Arizona quarterback Noah Fifita also made it clear he’s chasing something bigger than individual hardware. After a rough 2024, he bounced back last season and put together the kind of year that turns heads: more than 9,000 passing yards in his career, a career-best 3,228 yards in 2025, and 29 touchdown passes that set a new Arizona single-season record.
His 73 career touchdown throws are more than any other active player in the country. Arizona had been pushing a Heisman campaign for 2026, but Fifita’s focus is elsewhere.
“It’s not about a Heisman campaign. It’s about a Big 12 Championship … We have the people to go do it,” Fifita said. “The reason I came back was to do something that has never been done in Arizona history, and that’s to go win a Big 12 Championship.”
And at Iowa State, Jimmy Rogers is trying to make sure nobody labels what’s happening there as a rebuild. That would be the easy word after Matt Campbell’s departure sent a wave of players with him to Happy Valley and other places.
Rogers inherited a stripped-down roster in December and spent the offseason leaning heavily on the transfer portal. Iowa State now has 53 incoming transfers, the second-most in the Big 12.
Still, Rogers isn’t buying the rebuild label.
“To say that this is a rebuilding year, I don’t think anybody in the NFL says that, and they have a new roster every year. I don’t buy into that”, Rogers said.
It’s a bold way to frame a roster that has been turned over so heavily. The real test, of course, comes once the games start and everyone sees what this new Iowa State team actually looks like.
In Other News...
Texas Tech Just Pushed Its Big 12 Drama To A Breaking Point
Texas Techs latest off-field mess has only deepened the sense that its relationship with the Big 12 is fraying. The situation has already spilled beyond one player and into conference politics, with the league taking a hard line and the Red Raiders left to absorb the fallout as the season moves on without the quarterback they had been counting on.
What makes this one linger is the bigger question hanging over the program now. The punishment has sharpened the tension between Texas Tech and the conference office, and the chatter around a possible exit has grown loud enough to make people around the league wonder what comes next, including whether the Big 12 would eventually have to look elsewhere to fill the void. [Read more 🡒]
Iowa State Just Got Hit With A Brutal Big 12 Prediction
Iowa State heads into a season of major transition, with Jimmy Rogers taking over after Matt Campbells departure for Penn State and a roster that looks almost entirely rebuilt. In that kind of reset, preseason projections tend to lean on reputation and history as much as talent, and the Cyclones are already being treated like a team that has to prove it belongs in the conversation all over again.
One national outlook from USA Today did not leave much room for optimism, slotting Iowa State at the bottom of the Big 12 race in a 16-team league. Still, Rogers has spent enough time around low expectations to know they are not the same thing as a ceiling, and his track record suggests the Cyclones may be better equipped to outplay that kind of forecast than the prediction implies. [Read more 🡒]
Jimmy Rogers Made A Stunning Pick For Iowa States Best Player
Big 12 Media Day offered the first real glimpse of how Jimmy Rogers plans to frame Iowa States season, and the message was clear enough: this is a team in the middle of a reset. With a coaching change and plenty of roster turnover, the Cyclones are being viewed externally as a rebuilding group, but Rogers spent part of his time making the case that there is still a foundation worth talking about, especially on special teams.
One of the more notable parts of that conversation was his praise for kicker Kyle Konrardy, whom Rogers pointed to as a major strength on the roster. In a year when Iowa State may need every edge it can find, that kind of confidence in the kicking game matters, because special teams can swing field position, scoring range and close games while the rest of the lineup takes shape. [Read more 🡒]