I can understand skepticism of a league with basketball scores that has lost a bunch of traditional powers, a championship game and now has a bunch of non-traditional teams ascending.
But I think most of the criticisms of the Big12 are inaccurate and provincial, and fail to recognize the current strength of the league.
Most of the SEC chest thumping beyond Alabama is, IMO, bogus.
Alabama is the tentpole program of the SEC, and always have been. When Alabama wasn’t great in the early 2000s, the SEC wasn’t perceived as dominant. But now that Alabama is in the midst of the greatest dynasty of the modern era (and arguably greatest all time), that tentpole causes false perceptions of the rest of the conference.
Don’t get me wrong - Alabama plays in the best division in cfb, and plays top-tier schedules every year. That is one of the things that makes Alabama’s dynasty unique. In addition to the best division, Alabama plays Tenn, the most storied program in the weaker division every year, and schedules credible OOC games. The result is Alabama typically has a top-10 quality schedule, and often has the best schedule of all contenders (as they do again this year.)
But other SEC teams don’t deserve extra credit for being Alabama’s rival.
Baylor schedules weak OOC games…But look at Georgia and Kentucky and Texas A&M. Sagarin ranks Georgia’s schedule worse than Baylor’s. Meanwhile it ranks Texas A&M as middle-of-the-road by Bg12 standards. Texas, Iowa State and Kansas schedules are ranked 1-2-3. So there is little truth to the idea that being in the SEC implies a hard schedule while being in the Big12 implies a weak schedule.
All teams are connected by performance data, and it is far more accurate to look at this data in total, rather than looking at results of individual games that suit our own prejudices. The fact that the Big12 is 2-0 vs SEC this year is meaningless compared to Sagarin’s conference rankings algorithm that take into account 1000s of games rather than 2. Sagarin currently says the SEC West is the best league in football, followed by the Big12. This is not unusual - the SEC West has nearly always been at the top recently, with the Big12 not too far behind.
Don’t get me wrong - the SEC is a good league even without a dominant Alabama. But Alabama is really the tentpole, and it seems most other SEC fans think that being a rival of Alabama makes them (and their schedules) better than they are. Sometimes Alabama fans get caught up in imagining the same thing. Alabama plays a legit, tough game nearly every week. But there is a big difference between being a good team capable of playing the spoiler to a dynastic monster, and being a legitimately elite team.
Most of the SEC teams besides Alabama that won titles recently got lucky.
If you look at Auburn’s 2010 title objectively - it was a fluke. They were the only team in the BCS era to make a championship game without legit top-10 quality defense, and their defense wasn’t even top-40. If you look at ESPN’s efficiency matrices, they were the 7th best team that year, and their overall quality was much lower than other champions. Performance data screams that 2010 Auburn is the weakest champion of the BCS era by a good measure…They were essentially a mediocre team with an out-of-this-world QB that got very lucky.
Of course Auburn deserved the title in 2010 for going 14-0…As did Florida in 2006 and LSU in 2007. But in all of those years, an SEC team won despite unimpressive performance data relative to other champions - or even relative to other elite teams that fell just short of winning a title….In fact, when you crunch the performance data, it is pretty clear that none of these champions were actually as good as the 2013 Alabama team that lost its last two games to inferior opponents. Sometimes the best team doesn't win, and luck can play a role - both good and bad.
All of Alabama’s championship teams (in addition to 2008 Florida) are ranked at the top of ESPN’s efficiency matrices in their year, and have overall scores much higher than these weaker champions.
The Big12 does not have an Alabama. But if Alabama had been in the Big12 during Saban’s dynasty, Alabama would have still played top-tier schedules, and the Big12 would be perceived as the top league, IMO.
The thing, IMO, that makes the Big12 special right now is that there is a higher density of top quality coaches than any other league. I think Stoops, Patterson and Briles are all top-10 coaches. TCU’s win over Ole Miss last year is just one game and doesn’t prove a lot about the relative strength of the leagues….But I do think it proved (when combined with their season overall) that TCU was a legitimately elite team, and could have potentially won the title if they made the playoff.
Bill Snyder is of course a hall-of-famer. I also think Gundy is a great, underrated coach. There isn’t a person in Stillwater who would want Les Miles back over him. He hasn’t won a title, but he has produced teams that grade out better than most of the non-Alabama SEC champions.
A ten-team league with that many good coaches is a tough league to play in. I’m not saying it is as good as the SEC West. But the difference between a Big12 schedule and an SEC West schedule is going to have more to do with the quality of OOC competition scheduled than anything else.