There won’t be a Big 12 football preseason poll being released in conjunction with the league’s media days this year, which kicked off Tuesday morning at the Ford Center in Frisco, Texas.
The conference got rid of the poll, one year after Arizona State was projected to finish last in the league in 2024, only to win the Big 12 championship months later.
That leaves us having to find other solutions for projecting how the Big 12 will play out in 2025.
How about the inexact science of video games?
Thankfully, EA Sports’ College Football 26 went out on early release Monday for those willing to dish out some extra cash to get early access to the video game.
Talk about great timing.
Don’t take this as an actual prediction for how the Big 12 will end up at the conclusion of the 2025 regular season. Rather, it’s a fun look at how College Football 26 perceives the strength of each Big 12 program, while also casting a light on the parity of the league beyond the expected favorite — at least in the video game world.
After last season’s Big 12 preseason poll, where contenders turned pretenders and pretenders turned contenders, what’s the harm in a little video game prognostication fun?
How it was set up and one key asterisk
- For this experiment, I ran 10 individual 2025 season simulations in dynasty mode to create a bigger sample size, with the hope that any extreme results would be averaged out. (Last year, I ran 100 simulations on the 2024 season to see how often Utah, a preseason favorite, made the College Football Playoff, but I was on a time crunch this time around.)
- I randomly chose a Big 12 program each time to be the team I would coach, though at no point did I ever actually play the game. I only simulated through each week to the end of the season and recorded the results.
- One key note: Jake Retzlaff remains on BYU’s roster in the video game, potentially skewing the results favorably for the Cougars (as evidenced by where they finished on average, see below). With no clear indication of who BYU will have at starting quarterback this season, I didn’t adjust rosters for the Cougars, or for anyone for that matter.
How College Football 26 predicts the Big 12 will finish this season
There was a clear favorite in the College Football 26 world: Texas Tech won the Big 12 title in six of the 10 simulated seasons.
Four other teams all won a Big 12 championship once, a list that includes Arizona State, Baylor, BYU and Cincinnati.
To calculate the projected finish, I determined each team’s average finish in the Big 12 standings for each simulated season. I also included their average number of regular-season conference wins.
Here are the results (your unofficial preseason Big 12 poll):
Team — Avg. finish in Big 12 standings — Avg. number of conference wins
- Texas Tech — 2.2 — 7.1
- Baylor — 3.1 — 6.8
- BYU — 3.8 — 5.8
- Arizona State — 4.7 — 5.6
- Kansas State — 5.0 — 5.4
- Cincinnati — 5.9 — 4.9
- Iowa State — 6.6 — 5.0
- Colorado — 7.6 — 4.2
- Kansas — 7.7 — 4.5
- West Virginia — 7.9 — 4.5
- Houston — 8.5 — 4.0
- TCU — 10.5 — 3.4
- Utah — 10.7 — 3.4
- UCF — 11.7 — 2.5
- Arizona — 12.5 — 2.6
- Oklahoma State — 13.3 — 2.1
Here’s where things get wacky
There are some interesting developments from the 10 simulations — like Houston and West Virginia projected to finish higher than TCU and Utah. In the case of teams like the Utes and Oklahoma State, last season’s surprise struggles seemed to factor into how poorly they fared in these simulations.
Looking beyond just the projected Big 12 finishes, though, there were also a handful of eye-popping (and sometimes eye-rolling) results from this experiment that bear mentioning.
Texas Tech not only made the CFP multiple times, it won the national championship multiple times. In two of the simulations, the Red Raiders — who are relying on a heavy dose of transfers (including 13 four-star newbies) to help build their 2025 roster — won the national title to cap off an undefeated season.
Those weren’t the only times Texas Tech found success in the CFP, though. In another simulation, the Red Raiders reached the CFP national championship game, only to fall to Georgia, and in another they advanced to the semifinals.
If Texas Tech (or someone else) could provide this kind of a run for the Big 12 in real life during the 2025 season, it would immensely help a power conference dealing with a perception problem that its own parity is hurting the league.
Speaking of unexpected projected national champions — what about BYU? This was an even crazier result than the Red Raiders’ run to national titles in two different simulations.
In one simulation where there was a four-way tie for first place in the Big 12, the Cougars won a tiebreaker to earn a spot in the league championship game after going 6-3 in the regular season.
BYU took advantage of its postseason opportunity, beating Colorado in the Big 12 championship game to earn an automatic spot in the CFP as the No. 12, and final, seed.
The Cougars then rattled off four wins as the lowest seed, beating Texas, Alabama and Missouri on their way to a spot in the national championship game. Then, BYU won a thriller over Michigan to capture the national crown.
Oh, the crazy scenarios video games come up with. This would be truly unbelievable, especially with an unsettled QB situation going into the season.
How about a Heisman winner from the Big 12 — from a Newcomer of the Year? OK, Utah fans, here’s your turn for a wild, unexpected result from the simulations.
In one simulation, the Utes’ new QB1, New Mexico transfer Devon Dampier, won the coveted Heisman Trophy after throwing for more than 3,200 yards and 24 touchdowns to eight interceptions, while also rushing for nearly 700 yards and 11 more scores.
(Side note: I simulated an entire season for Dampier on Monday just for fun, and I would have LOVED to be able to use “Heisman” in that headline. Sigh.)
The funny thing is, that all came during a 7-6 season for Utah, where the Utes lost to BYU in the regular season, but then faced the Cougars in the Texas Bowl and beat BYU the second time around.
One can dream. Utah has never produced a Heisman winner, but there is plenty of hype surrounding Dampier, who on Monday was named the Big 12 Preseason Newcomer of the Year.
Who won the battle of BYU vs. Utah? Considering this article is coming from Beehive State country, it’s worth noting how the Cougars and Utes fared in comparison to one another.
In the 10 simulated seasons, BYU won the regular-season matchup seven times out of 10, winning by an average score of 30.4 to 23.6.
If you count Utah’s bowl win over BYU in one simulation, the Cougars held a 7-4 record over the Utes in this experiment.
In the 10 simulations, BYU averaged 9.8 wins per season, reached the CFP twice, and was ranked in the final top 25 rankings seven times.
Utah, meanwhile, averaged 6.2 wins per season and won a bowl game in three of the four times the Utes qualified for the postseason.
Conclusion
There you have it — “definitive” proof of how the Big 12 will play out this season.
That, or a baseless yet entertaining look at the sport we all love through the lens of a video game.