Nice article in the Sunday DMN about the B12 being the best and getting better. Some excerpts:
https://www.dallasnews.com/...
“ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla doesn’t buy into any of the arguments against the Big 12 not having been the best league in the country for the last decade. Kansas and Baylor won titles and Texas Tech played in overtime of a championship game just in the last five years. Fraschilla expanded on that theme.”
They’ve been ranked No. 1 conference nine of the last 11 years and were No. 2 when they weren’t. And they’ve had five different teams go to the Elite Eight in the last five years,’’ he said.
That’s five teams in four tournaments since the 2020 affair was canceled at the outset of the pandemic. Texas and Kansas State traveled to the Elite Eight last year and, naturally, Baylor, Kansas and Tech made it on those championship game trips. Won’t surprise anyone if two new names — Houston and Iowa State — make it this year, and guess what?
It’s a shame that basketball suffers in comparison to football because of the massive amount of conference-based revenues football generates (not saying the hoopsters don’t get a nice check from CBS). Instead of folks clutching their pearls over the loss of Texas and Oklahoma from the football landscape, there would be a much louder discussion about who’s coming to the Big 12 to play roundball.
Start with Arizona, the last regular season champion of the Pac-12 and a likely No. 2 seed tomorrow. Then there’s Colorado, which played Oregon for the Pac-12 tournament title Saturday night in Las Vegas. Utah and Arizona State have been known to put together some decent basketball teams, and I would suspect this is the last year that Kansas departs the Big 12 tournament so quickly and quietly.
The Big 12 is likely to place nine teams in the March Madness field Sunday night, and who’s to say the league won’t make double figures in 2025