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. 

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.