Other than for the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, this was the first Big 12 Media Days that I’ve missed since 2017...possibly 2016. And from the outside looking in, I cetainly missed the craziness of tracking down coaches, players and athletic directors for Robert Allen’s radio show and for Pokes Report. But I digress.
It certainly seemed like an important two days as this is the final season for both Oklahoma and Texas and the first year for new member schools BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF. We all knew UCF would be chomping at the bit for this year’s Media Days as they sent a delegation to last year’s festivities and handed out their Space Game patches.
So, I think we’ll start with the Knights. It’s crazy to think back to their undefeated season in 2017 and now they’re in the Big 12. Despite all the hoopla and whether or not they deserved a playoff berth, the Knights certainly seem ready for Power Five football.
“For me personally, I'm very excited,” said head coach Gus Malzahn. “This is a great conference, one of the best football conferences in college football, and probably the deepest from top to bottom. So, I'm very excited about that. As far as challenging, the great thing, we've had over a year, almost a year and a half to get prepared for this moment and talking about having quality depth when you move up conferences and leagues, and specifically on the O-line and D-line. We’ve worked extremely hard, and I really feel like today going into fall camp that we do have quality depth on both lines of scrimmage, and that was really by design, and we really feel good about that. Just the overall excitement of the challenge of playing these great teams in this league is what's exciting for us.”
While I can’t sit here on July 13 and say the Knights will be competing for a Big 12 title in year one, but I think they’ll certainly be one of, if not the best team of the new four added.
One thing I think is interesting is just how long it’s going to take the new schools to get acclimated and I think BYU head coach Kalani Sitake hit the nail on the head. It’s going to take some time for the schools to get adjusted, but if you take a look at TCU, they had some good years, some down years, but played for a national title this past season.
“I mean, I've been through this before, and so have our offensive coordinator and our defensive coordinator when we were at Utah. So, we went through that transition from Mountain West Conference team to thePac-12, and I've also seen other teams that have made the transition. Like you look at TCU and what they've done. There’s information and things that you can see that are out there that people that have done it before, and what you try to do is you try to do what they did well and then lean on the experiences. I know we're at BYU so it's a little bit different and unique, but I need to find ways to turn that uniqueness into a strength for us and make sure it's a competitive advantage when we get on the field.”
I think Cincinnati is going to be an interesting case study for the next handful of seasons as they were seemingly on the cusp of being one of the top teams in the country, they lost a bunch of players/talent, as well as their coaching staff right before the move.
But what’s fun is having Dana Holgorsen back in the Big 12 with Houston. I’m sure there’s some OSU fans thought if he ever made his way back to the Big 12, it would be back in Stillwater and certainly not with another team, such as Houston joining the conference. But I’m sure there’s plenty of Red Bull in the Stillwater gas stations for when the Cougs make their way up to Stillwater at some point in the future.
