Ever since BYU accepted an invitation to join the Big 12 Conference last fall, a major talking point has been how strong the conference is in men’s basketball, and that point was driven home on Monday night.
After the national championship game on Monday, which saw Kansas beat North Carolina, many observed on Twitter how great the Big 12 has been in the NCAA Tournament over the past few years.
At the top, Kansas’ win gave the Big 12 its second straight national championship after Baylor won it last year, but it doesn’t stop there.
In 2019 (the Big Dance was canceled in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic), Texas Tech was the runner-up — falling to Virginia in the national championship game — and in 2018, Kansas made the Final Four, where it fell to eventual champion Villanova in the semifinals (the Jayhawks, of course, avenged that loss in this year’s semifinals last Saturday).
Texas Tech had also made the Elite Eight in 2018.
Beside those actual results, Kansas and Baylor were widely projected to be two of the four No. 1 seeds in the 2020 tournament before it got canceled.
In all this season, six teams from the current Big 12 made the NCAA Tournament (including Texas, which will be departing for the SEC), as did Houston, which was one of the teams to get invited to the Big 12 last fall alongside BYU.