The Big 12 race may still be alive on the field, but off it, a different kind of conversation is building. With three weeks left in the regular season, Colorado’s Deion Sanders, TCU’s Sonny Dykes and Kansas’ Lance Leipold are all staring at the same uncomfortable reality: success in the past is no longer protecting them from questions about the future.
At Colorado, the picture has turned especially bleak. The Buffaloes have just one conference win, and the program has started to look increasingly out of sync.
Sanders, meanwhile, has made his weekly media sessions feel like their own side story, spending less time on football and more time on everything around it. He’s taken aim at writers for producing a book about him and his program without his cooperation, and he’s pushed back on the idea that his team’s record reflects how good he believes it is.
The numbers, though, are hard to ignore. Colorado is 6-15 overall, with only two league wins since going 9-4 in 2024.
Strip away that 2024 season and the Buffaloes are 10-23 in Sanders’ other years. If they drop the rest of their games, that mark becomes 10-26 across 2023, 2025 and 2026.
Athletic director Fernando Lovo, who did not hire Sanders and arrived last year, now has a decision to make: is the attention Sanders brings enough to justify another year, or has that window already closed?
Dykes is in a different but still uneasy spot at TCU. His tenure began with a jolt in 2022, when the Horned Frogs rode Max Duggan all the way to the CFP national championship game before falling to Georgia. That team finished 13-2, and TCU still has not won a CFP game in either the four-team or 12-team format after a decade of trying.
Since then, the results have been more ordinary, though still better than Colorado’s. TCU is 27-20 since the start of the 2023 season, and Dykes’ overall record sits at 40-22 in nearly five years.
Even so, frustration is starting to bubble up in Fort Worth, especially after the way TCU lost in Arizona on Friday. Athletic director Mike Buddie, like Lovo at Colorado, did not hire the coach he now has to evaluate.
If boosters decide they’re no longer willing to help carry the NIL load - outside of the House settlement rev share, of course - Buddie could be pushed into a tougher conversation than he wants.
Kansas presents the most complicated case of all. If you’re Travis Goff, what exactly do you do with Lance Leipold?
On one hand, Leipold has been the Jayhawks’ most successful coach since Mark Mangino, and that matters at a place where success has been scarce. He led Kansas to back-to-back bowl games and delivered a 9-4 season in 2023, when the Jayhawks finished No. 23 in the country.
But the last two seasons have been far less convincing. Kansas has gone 5-7 in back-to-back years, and this season the Jayhawks need two wins just to equal that total.
Jalon Daniels has been the primary quarterback through much of that stretch, and now the pressure is shifting toward Goff as well. He has spent the last two years pushing to refurbish David Booth Stadium, and projects like that tend to sharpen the scrutiny when the wins stop coming.
Donors and boosters start asking whether the coach is still the right fit.
Like Sanders and Dykes, Leipold would likely come with a hefty buyout, which only complicates the decision. Goff will have to balance that cost against whatever move he might consider once the season ends.
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