2025 College Football Review: Big 12
Photo by Julio Cortez from The Associated Press
America’s chaos conference was actually kind of quiet this year.
Bummer.
But alas, we still must go over the season in large for the Big 12.
Biggest Surprise: Houston Cougars
Year two of Willie Fritz was a massive success.
Houston doesn’t have a great, historic football culture at the school, and their recruiting classes have not been tremendous.
Despite all of that, the Cougs still went 9-3 this year.
Willie Fritz is one damn good coach.
Biggest Disappointment: TCU Horned Frogs
It feels like forever ago that Sonny Dykes had the Frogs in the national championship game.
But after quietly winning 9 games last year, people expected TCU to take a leap towards the conference championship game.
Instead, it was an 8-4 season with a few devastating losses to Arizona State and Iowa State that kept them from being contenders.
Bad season? Not at all.
But the expectations were higher than that.
What I Got Right
Colorado sliding back after losing Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter felt obvious to me, despite many thinking they’d build off of it and keep pushing towards Big 12 contention.
3-9 year, and 1-8 in the conference.
Not good.
What I Got Wrong
I said that the years where nobody expects anything from Oklahoma State are the years that they surprise everyone and have a great year.
Turns out, people expected nothing from Oklahoma State because they were absolutely horrendous.
1-11 and a loss to Tulsa?
Shockingly, that did not have them contending for the conference title.
Coach Of The Year: Willie Fritz
Want to know Willie Fritz’s coaching history?
He turned around Central Missouri in division II. He turned around Sam Houston State in FCS. He turned around Georgia Southern. He turned around Tulane.
He won 9 games in year two at Houston.
He just wins everywhere he goes.
What’s not to like?
Player Of The Year: Jacob Rodriguez
Rodriguez might have had the most dominant defensive year since Manti Te’o this year for Texas Tech.
Tech’s excellent defense ran through him, and got him a possible nomination for the Heisman.
I’m excited to see his postseason.
Team Of The Year: Texas Tech Red Raiders
The beauty of the Big 12 recently is that you never really knew who was going to win it all.
This year, however, it was clear early on that Texas Tech was the dominant team, and they only had one misstep the whole year.
Other than that?
Completely and utterly dominant.
The deserved team of the year, and deserved playoff representative.
