Joe’s Notes: Big 12 Football Needs a Juggernaut

Last night, three Big 12 players were selected in the first round of the NFL Draft. This placed the Big 12 fifth among conferences in quantity of players selected, but the Big Ten and ACC had only four apiece, and the Pac-12’s about to not exist anymore anyway. Not a problem for the Big 12.

Except.

Except all three of those Big 12 players were drafted out of Texas and Oklahoma.

To be fair, Arizona had a first round draftee, and to be fair, this is only one year, and to be fair, the number of players a conference has drafted in the first round is not a particularly telling measure of the overall strength of a conference. What this gets at, though, is the Big 12’s real problem: The narrative doesn’t care about the overall strength of a conference. The narrative cares about the teams and players at the top.

The Big 12 is, top to bottom, a better football conference than the ACC. This is offensive to some ACC fans, but it’s the truth. The Big 12’s third-best program is better than the ACC’s third-best. The Big 12’s median is better than the ACC’s median. The Big 12’s worst is better than the ACC’s worst. Overall, the Big 12 is a better conference. But when it comes to programs who could believably compete for a national championship in the next few years, good luck convincing college football fans that Utah and TCU have a better chance than Florida State and Clemson.

When ranking conferences, explicitly or otherwise, people don’t care too much about the average SP+ rating of each conference’s teams or each conference’s collective strength of record in nonconference play. People care about specific, upper-echelon things: Which conference’s best team lasted longest in the playoff? Which conference’s best team was ranked higher at the end of the year? How many teams did each conference send to the playoff in the first place?

None of these, of course, involve NFL draft picks. But the trend is going to show up in both places: While the Big 12 is a better football league than the ACC, the ACC is going to have more top-32 players. While the Big 12 is a better football league than the ACC, the ACC is going to place teams higher in the recruiting rankings. While the Big 12 is a better football league than the ACC, its lack of marquee programs is going to hamper it unless somebody, very soon, can step up and imprint themselves upon the casual college football consciousness alongside Clemson and FSU. The Big 12 isn’t competing with the SEC and the Big Ten right now. It’s competing against the ACC. In a fair fight or a reasonable argument, the Big 12 would have the lead. But this is sports. The Big 12 needs a titan to be taken seriously. That’s neither fair nor reasonable, but it’s the situation at hand.

Staying Alive

The Magic? Alive. The 76ers? Very much alive. The Lakers, Lightning, and Islanders? Start packing the suitcase.

Between the NBA and the NHL, the next three days feature 23 playoff games. Only a quarter of the 16 ongoing series can be decided, but all the others except Heat/Celtics could see a team get to three wins, the doorstep of victory. How much each series remains in doubt, by betting odds:

These aren’t perfectly correlated to probabilities—sports books are going to give artificially short odds on a team like the Lakers, not having a lot of leverage to acquire bets on the Nuggets as a counterweight—but they do serve as a ranking of sorts. What do we find? Despite the Heat’s upset win in Game 2, they’re enjoying twice as little hope from neutral parties as multiple teams who are down 2–0. Every other matchup is about where you’d expect it to be if the teams were roughly competitive with one another.

The Rest

MLB:

• Jackson Holliday was demoted to AAA today, baseball’s top overall prospect batting just .059 and sporting a worse wRC+ (overall results) and xwOBA (expected results given walks, strikeouts, and quality of contact) than any of baseball’s 183 qualified hitters. Holliday should be ok—this is a tiny sample and his prospect grade comes from a big one—but it’s a tough draw for the kid, and for the Orioles, who lead the AL East but don’t currently have a single sub-.500 team in their division.

College basketball:

• Hunter Dickinson is coming back to Kansas, which was the expected thing if you knew he had eligibility remaining (hand up—I kind of forgot about him and assumed he didn’t). Will Kansas be better this year than last year? Probably. If they were to be worse, they would be the worst Kansas team since probably Roy Williams’s first year, when they went 6–8 in the Big 12 while banned from postseason play. But while Dickinson, Dajuan Harris Jr., and KJ Adams all return from last year’s team, Bill Self is relying on a lot of transfer pieces fitting neatly together. They’d be one of the most first year transfer-heavy teams we’ve seen achieve major success in this free transfer era.

The NBA:

• I think the series I “get” the least is Pacers/Bucks. I don’t know who’s going to show up today. The Pacers were said to be dead. The Bucks are without Giannis, still had decently high expectations, are still underperforming those expectations (as they have all year), and are still hard to quit? I don’t know what to think.
• If last night was an indication, expect the Suns and Pelicans to come up big today and tomorrow. No sweeps for Cleveland and New York, even if Denver showed how different a class they’re in than the Lakers.

The NHL:

• The Knights are the Western Conference favorites right now in the majority of places I checked, despite there being no chance they enjoy home-ice advantage for any series these playoffs. I think the biggest thing this illustrates is how tightly packed the West is, especially compared to the East, where the best teams have separated themselves and are waiting to see if Boston can catch back up.

Chicago:

• Hear me out on this: The biggest thing the Bears should be happy about is not that they drafted Caleb Williams. That’s big. It’s good to have a good prospect at quarterback. The biggest thing the Bears should be happy about, though, is that they were in a position where taking Williams and then grabbing a wide receiver in the top ten made sense. I’m personally a little skeptical about the offensive line’s depth being what it needs to be, but the consensus seems to feel pretty comfortable about that unit, making the biggest immediate question how the offense clicks with a rookie quarterback and a new offensive coordinator. The ingredients seem to be there on the offensive side of the ball, and the defense is in fine enough shape. Top-ten wide receivers are a bit of a draft luxury. The Bears put themselves in position to take one rather than address a glaring need. Credit to Ryan Poles for getting them there.
• The Cubs are in Boston for the weekend, and their work’s cut out for them. Kutter Crawford’s 0.66 ERA isn’t going to hold up, but his sub-3.00 xERA and FIP have come through a big sample of starts. Tanner Houck has been just as good, and recently threw a complete-game shutout of the team with the best record in the American League. Only tomorrow against swingman Josh Winckowski do the Cubs have some sort of offensive comfort, and that’s only comfortable if they get into the bullpen enough tonight to make a few guys unavailable. Relatively speaking, offense has been the Cubs’ strength so far, but this is a tough test.

The Packers:

• The Jordan Morgan pick seems like a five-iron to the fairway. Not flashy, but gets the job done. Offensive line depth is great to have, and Morgan comes with all the upside you’d expect from a first-round pick. Good stuff. Fun to have four picks in these next two rounds.