2025 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: Big 12

Last week we looked at how Big 12 teams fared in terms of yards per play. This week, we turn our attention to how the season played out in terms of the Adjusted Pythagorean Record, or APR. For an in-depth look at APR, click here. If you didn’t feel like clicking, here is the Reader’s Digest version. APR looks at how well a team scores and prevents touchdowns. Non-offensive touchdowns, field goals, extra points, and safeties are excluded. The ratio of offensive touchdowns to touchdowns allowed is converted into a winning percentage. Pretty simple actually.

Once again, here are the 2025 Big 12 standings.

And here are the APR standings with conference rank in offensive touchdowns, touchdowns allowed, and APR in parentheses. This includes conference games only with the championship game excluded.

Finally, Big 12 teams are sorted by the difference between their actual number of wins and their expected number of wins according to APR.

I use a game and a half as a somewhat arbitrary standard to determine if teams over or underachieved relative to their APR. By that standard, both Arizona State and BYU overachieved. BYU also overachieved relative to their YPP numbers and we went over some reasons for that last week. For Arizona State, the culprit for their overachievement is simple, they were 5-1 in one-score Big 12 games. Five of their six conference victories came by five points or less, continuing a trend for the Sun Devils since joining the Big 12. In their two seasons in the conference, Arizona State is 9-2 in one-score conference games (4-3 in all other conference games). Does close game regression come for the Sun Devils in 2026?

New Kids on the Block

As you may have read in the papers, the Big 12 has undergone some membership changes over the past few seasons. Their luxury programs (Oklahoma and Texas) sought the riches of the SEC a little more than a decade after Missouri and Texas A&M did the same. To buttress their position in the college football hierarchy, the Big 12 in effect 'called up' four teams from the lower levels (this is not intended to be derogatory) of college football. BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF joined the Big 12 in 2023, the final season the Sooners and Longhorns were members. With the Pac-12 falling apart thanks to a quartet of defections to the Big 10, the Big 12 sent out a lifeline to four of the non-coastal members (Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah). Its early, but it never hurts to take stock of how those new members have performed. Which of these eight neophytes has been the best addition so far? Read on to find out. 

We'll begin with the call-ups. These four teams have enjoyed varying levels of success this century with three of the four (Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF) posting at least one unbeaten regular season since 2011. And BYU is famously the only non-power team to win a college football national title in the modern era. How does this quartet shake up?

BYU is the only call-up that has acclimated to Big 12 play thus far. All four teams struggled in their first season in the Big 12 (combined 8-28 conference record in 2023), but BYU has posted back-to-back ranked finishes and even qualified for the Big 12 Championship Game in 2025. Cincinnati and Houston also finally got their collective acts together in 2025, but UCF has floundered since joining the conference. The Knights are tied with Oklahoma State for the worst Big 12 record since 2023 (7-20) and that of course includes Oklahoma State's current eighteen-game conference losing streak. 

We'll now move to the 'Four Corners' schools. Utah had the best recent track record of the four, winning the Pac-12 championship in 2021 and 2022. 

Arizona State is the only former Pac-12 school to post winning conference records in each of their first two seasons in Big 12. Arizona and Utah both struggled in 2024 before bouncing back with strong campaigns in 2025 while Colorado did the opposite, faltering to a 1-8 conference mark after losing Travis Hunter and some other players from their 2024 team.