Why is the national media so obsessed with ranking the Big 12's strength of schedule as some kind of fatal flaw? They look at the lack of a perennial top-five team and call it weak, completely ignoring the week-to-week brutality. Last season, the conference had eight teams finish between 7-5 and 9-3. That's parity, not poverty. Arizona's path to a potential title game is a gauntlet of competent, well-coached teams, not a couple of marquee games padded with cupcakes.
The data proves it. The average SP+ rating of Big 12 teams last year was higher than the ACC's. The middle and bottom of this league are far tougher than people give credit for. Going on the road to Stillwater or Lubbock or Fort Worth is a legitimate challenge, especially now with the chaos of massive portal overhauls at places like Oklahoma State and Colorado. There are no automatic wins.
So the real question is, when will the narrative catch up to reality? A schedule filled with teams ranked between 15th and 45th nationally is objectively more difficult than playing one top-10 team and three outside the top 80. Why are we not talking about how surviving this conference weekly grind prepares a team better for the playoff than cruising through a lopsided division?
