2025 Yards Per Play: Big 12

We are one third of the way through our offseason sojourn. This week we stay big and look at the Big 12.

Here are the 2025 Big 12 standings. 

So we know what each team achieved, but how did they perform? To answer that, here are the Yards Per Play (YPP), Yards Per Play Allowed (YPA) and Net Yards Per Play (Net) numbers for each Big 12 team. This includes conference play only with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

College football teams play either eight or nine conference games. Consequently, their record in such a small sample may not be indicative of their quality of play. A few fortuitous bounces here or there can be the difference between another ho-hum campaign or a special season. Randomness and other factors outside of our perception play a role in determining the standings. It would be fantastic if college football teams played 100 or even 1000 games. Then we could have a better idea about which teams were really the best. Alas, players would miss too much class time, their bodies would be battered beyond recognition, and I would never leave the couch. As it is, we have to make do with the handful of games teams do play. In those games, we can learn a lot from a team’s YPP. Since 2005, I have collected YPP data for every conference. I use conference games only because teams play such divergent non-conference schedules and the teams within a conference tend to be of similar quality. By running a regression analysis between a team’s Net YPP (the difference between their Yards Per Play and Yards Per Play Allowed) and their conference winning percentage, we can see if Net YPP is a decent predictor of a team’s record. Spoiler alert. It is. For the statistically inclined, the correlation coefficient between a team’s Net YPP in conference play and their conference record is around .66. Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2025 season, which teams in the Big 12 met this threshold? Here are Big 12 teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

BYU and UCF were the only two Big 12 teams that saw their final record differ significantly from their expected record based on YPP. The Cougars exceeded their expected record while the Knights underachieved. The Cougars and Knights were basically mirror images of each other. The Cougars won all the high leverage events that buoys a team's record while the Knights faltered in those high leverage situations. BYU was 3-0 in one-score Big 12 games and finished with a solid +7 turnover margin in league play. They also converted fourth downs at a much higher rate than they allowed (converted 67% of their attempts while allowing just 42%) and scored touchdowns once they got in the red zone while holding opponents out of the end zone. BYU scored touchdowns on 23 of their 36 red zone drives in Big 12 play (64%) while their opponents managed just a 46% touchdown rate on such trips (17 out of 37). Meanwhile, UCF was 1-2 in one-score Big 12 games and finished with a turnover margin of -9 in Big 12 play. The Knights struggled to convert fourth downs (12 of 28) while their Big 12 opponents converted more than half the time (10 of 19). The Knights were decent when it came to scoring touchdowns in the red zone (11 of 20), but their Big 12 opponents scored touchdowns more than twice as often as they did not on red zone trips (23 of 34). 

Longest Conference Losing Streaks

On November 25, 2023, Oklahoma State beat BYU 40-34 in overtime to lock up a spot in the Big 12 Championship Game. We didn't know it at the time, but that was the last Big 12 game Mike Gundy would win at his alma mater. The Cowboys were expected to be Big 12 contenders in 2024, with the preseason consensus putting them second in the conference behind Utah. A 3-0 start in non-conference play got them to thirteenth in the AP Poll, but the Cowboys lost all their Big 12 games, culminating with a shellacking at the hands of Colorado. The 52-point loss in Boulder was the largest of Gundy's tenure (to that point). I expected a bounce back from Oklahoma State heading into 2025. The preseason consensus was more lukewarm, pegging the Cowboys fourteenth of sixteen teams in the Big 12. The Cowboys opened with a victory over an FCS team and then traveled to Oregon where they eclipsed their previous record for worst loss under Gundy, losing 69-3 to the Ducks. With a week off to prepare for a non-power in-state opponent, the Cowboys looked utterly hopeless in managing just twelve points in a home loss to Tulsa. The Gundy era ended after the loss to the Golden Hurricane and the Cowboys once again lost all their Big 12 games, this time under interim coach Doug Meacham. For the innumerate, that means Oklahoma State is currently riding an eighteen-game conference losing streak. How does that compare to other recent conference losing streaks? Pretty favorably. 

The Cowboys and Boilermakers both have active eighteen-game conference losing streaks heading into the 2026 season (Connecticut does as well, but they left the American after the 2019 season riding a nineteen-game skid and have been Independent since). Were they both to lose out in conference play, they would surpass Vanderbilt as the streakiest losers of the College Football Playoff era. Oklahoma State got the coach and quarterback combo from North Texas, so I expect them to be improved in 2026. A third consecutive winless campaign in the Big 12 would be shocking. Purdue has a rougher go of it in the rugged Big 10, especially with their in-state rival becoming a football power, but I also expect the Boilermakers to find a league win somewhere in 2026. My best guess as to when both break their respective streaks? Oklahoma State opens Big 12 play with a road trip to West Virginia, but then has a bye before UCF comes to Stillwater. On Saturday October 10, 2026, the Cowboys will end their then nineteen-game conference skid against the Knights. As for the Boilermakers, they also host a winnable conference game on October 10 with the Minnesota Golden Gophers coming to West Lafayette. Purdue will have played road conference games against UCLA and Illinois by that point, so their conference losing streak should be sitting on twenty. Mark your calendars for the second Saturday in October when a couple of losers put an end to their respective streaks.