Rating the 2024 Big 12 Football Schedule

STILLWATER – It was announced on Monday morning, June 17 that the Oklahoma State Cowboys opening game with two-time defending FCS Division I champion and winner of 29 games-in-a-row South Dakota State would be at 1 p.m. on Saturday Aug. 31. Television would be streaming on ESPN+/Big 12 Now. That got me thinking of schedules and after going through and picking all the Big 12 games a couple of weeks ago in order to send in my picks for the Big 12 Conference Media Poll, I realized that all schedules in the Big 12 now with 16 teams and only nine conference games are not created equal, far from it. Phil Steele realized the same.

PhilSteele.com

Phil Steele

Steele rated all conference schedules on his website. He noted that some teams get five home games and other only four. Oklahoma State actually plays five conference road games (Kansas State, BYU, Baylor, TCU, and Colorado). However, I agree with Steele in that it is more who play and not where you play except when you are playing Oklahoma State, Utah, Kansas State, Iowa State, West Virginia, and UCF. The Cowboys play three of those teams and two (Utah, West Virginia) are at home. 

This first season is strange as well in that normally a conference record (conference games only) would balance out with every game having a winner and a loser. Not the case this time around as the Big 12 lost two schools, Oklahoma and Texas from their conference. Those two teams combined to go 15-3 in conference games last season. Both the Big 12 and the Pac-12 where Arizona, Arizona State,  Colorado, and Utah are comging from. Those four schools combined to go 15-21 in conference games last season. Therefore, the Big 12 returning conference record from the 2023 season should be 154-154 and .500. Instead it is 63-81 for a win percentage of .438. 

Now to figure out the schedule, you look at which opponents each team faces. Here are last season’s conference records. 

 As Phil Steele wrote in his blog West Virginia faces the toughest schedule at 42-39 for their opponents conference records with only two other teams facing foes that combined for over 50% in Colorado and Arizona St whose foes were 41-40 in league play last year.

Bruce Waterfield/OSU Athletics

Oklahoma State only has to play three of the schools Poke sReport considers power teams.

Now on the other end of the spectrum, the schools seemingly getting the better end of the scheduling matrix are Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Kansas, and Arizona. The Wildcats schedule is made up of teams that went 29-52 last season. That is winning 35.8 percent of their games. The other three teams have schedules with teams that won less than a combined 40 percent.

There are some flaws to that line of thought as all of the schedules last season were not the same. Colorado went 1-8 but they played Oregon, USC, Arizona, Oregon State, Washington State, and Utah with all teams being above .500 in conference.

I agreed with Phil Steele that the teams you would most want to avoid in the Big 12 this season would be Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Utah, Iowa State, Kansas, Arizona, West Virginia, and UCF. That would be my upper half of the conference. Here goes with the schedule rating. The H/A is the schools breakdown of home vs. away conference games. Everything else is self explanatory.

It isn’t exact science, but it is something to think about.