Wait so Bill Connelly dropped his Big 12 preview and has Texas Tech on top again and I just read through the whole thing shaking my head. This reminds me of 2014 when nobody gave us a shot after losing our quarterback and we went to the Peach Bowl and hung with Ole Miss. These computer projections never account for what happens when you get a group of kids who actually buy in during fall camp. I watched Coach Patterson build programs with two-star kids who played four years together and knew the defense blindfolded by November.
Now we got North Carolina coming to Fort Worth for a Thursday night opener and all I hear is how we are middle of the pack. You remember what happened the last time we opened agaainst an ACC team on a Thursday? 2017 against Arkansas at the new stadium. We punched them in the mouth and the whole country saw what Fort Worth was about. That team had no business being ranked where they ended up but they had something you cannot project. They had fight.
I miss when this conference made sense. When we knew every team in the league and the rivalries meant something. Now we got teams from the West Coast and old Big East schools running around and they want me to trust some algorithm that never watched a single snap of fall camp. The portal killed continuity and these projections cannot even account for that. Give me a team that has been grinding together since January over any computer model. I will take that bet every time.