2018-19 Big 12 Post-Mortem

On the national college basketball landscape, the ACC and Big Ten typically get the most attention from television networks. The SEC, armed with Kentucky and a massive football-driven TV contract, is not far behind. The Big East still hangs near the top, especially with its location in and around the U.S.’s media center.

Yet year after year of late, at least in the regular season, it’s often been quite simple: the Big 12 has been collectively better than all of them.

Don’t misinterpret-of course, the Big 12 is nobody’s underdog in the college sports pecking order. The league receives more than its share of air time on ESPN’s networks, financial resources that most leagues can only dream of, and all the benefits of Big Football conference collusion in scheduling.

Still, the Big 12 tends to sit in the shadows ever so slightly in college basketball behind conferences filled with massive alumni bases throughout (Big Ten), dominated by frothing coverage of Duke or Kentucky, or which are essentially two-hour window buys for Bill Walton’s stream of consciousness trips.

For the fifth time in six years, though, the Big 12 ranked as the No. 1 Division I conference in the NCAA’s metrics. This year was a new metric, but similar result: the Big 12 ranked No. 1 in the NET ranking, and for good measure it also was handily No. 1 in the old RPI.

The Big 12 went 100-30 in non-conference play this year, and eight of its ten teams won at least 20 games. Nine of the ten played in the postseason.

This season was notable also because for the first time in many years, the answer to who won the Big 12 regular season crown was “Not Kansas.” The Jayhawks’ remarkable streak of 14 consecutive years with at least a share of the Big 12 regular season crown ended as KU struggled on the road all year-3-8 in true road games all season and 3-6 in conference. Kansas State and Texas Tech shared first place, with Kansas two games behind in another year where it was hard for teams to dominate such a rugged circuit.

It was Texas Tech which would carry the Big 12 torch impeccably for the Jayhawks in March and into April. The Red Raiders were already a major surprise in the regular season, picked seventh before the season but opening 15-1 with only a very competitive loss to Duke. Tech later won nine straight to close out the regular season, capturing a share of the Big 12 title, and the Red Raiders went on a run in the NCAA Tournament, all the way to the first Final Four in school history. Chris Beard’s team didn’t stop until the championship game, rallying late to nearly win in regulation before falling to Virginia in overtime.

As has sometimes been the case in recent years, though, the Big 12’s regular season success and depth once again didn’t translate into NCAA tourney dominance. Texas Tech saved face for the conference with its NCAA Tournament performance, for other than the Red Raiders, it was not inspiring. It’s true that the league did mainly perform to seed, as it was seeded for a 7-6 record and finished 8-6 overall. Texas Tech was the only team to get as far as the Sweet 16, though, as 4 seed Kansas was routed in the second round by Auburn and fellow No. 4 Kansas State didn’t even get that far, falling to UC Irvine in the first round. Everyone else was gone by the end of the second round, too. It was a far cry from the year before, when three Big 12 teams made the Elite Eight and Kansas was in the Final Four.

Final Standings:

Conference Tournament
The Big 12 Tournament marked its 10th straight year at Kansas City’s Sprint Center. Remarkably, just three schools have won the title in the tourney’s history in K.C., and only five have won in the event’s 23-year overall history. One of them (Missouri-a winner in Kansas City and outside of there before it) is no longer a member of the conference, yet the trends still held once again.

To little surprise, this year’s tourney was again mighty competitive. The first round games (No. 8 TCU over Oklahoma State 73-70; 10 seed West Virginia edging No. 7 Oklahoma 72-71) were decided by a combined four points. Three of the four quarterfinals were also decided by single digits, including top seed Kansas State over TCU 70-61 and Kansas outlasting Texas 65-57 in a 3-vs.-6 game.

The tournament’s early story was West Virginia, which nipped Oklahoma in the first round and then torpedoed 2 seed Texas Tech 79-74 in the quarterfinals, with Emmitt Matthews scoring a career-high 28 and WVU pounding the Red Raiders on the glass 44-30. The Mountaineers finally ran out of gas in the semifinals, as Kansas made a run late in the first half and cruised in the second half to an 88-74 win.

By the end of Saturday night’s championship game, though, the team in the spotlight was the same as it had been three of the previous five years as well. Iowa State was seeded fifth and had lost five of six entering the tourney but handled No. 4 Baylor 83-66 in the quarterfinals and then finished its semifinal against No. 1 Kansas State on an 11-4 run, with Marial Shayok hitting a pair of huge three-pointers in the final minute of a 63-59 win. That set up the Cyclones and Jayhawks in the final, pairing the schools responsible for winning eight of the last nine Big 12 tourneys. With the game tied at 21-21, Iowa State put together a 20-3 run bookending the end of the first half and beginning of the second, and Kansas never got closer than nine the rest of the way. ISU finished the 78-66 win, improving to 5-0 in Big 12 tourney finals and winning the event for the fourth time in six years.

Postseason Awards
Player of the Year: Jarrett Culver, G, So., Texas Tech
Defensive Player of the Year: Barry Brown, G, Sr., Kansas State
Freshman of the Year: Jaxson Hayes, F, Texas
Newcomer of the Year: Dedric Lawson, F, Jr., Kansas
Sixth Man Award: Lindell Wigginton, G, So., Iowa State
Most Improved Player: Kristian Doolittle, F, Jr., Oklahoma
Coach of the Year: Chris Beard, Texas Tech

All-Conference Team
Barry Brown, G, Sr., Kansas State
Jarrett Culver, G, So., Texas Tech
Dedric Lawson, F, Jr., Kansas
Marial Shayok, G, Sr., Iowa State
Dean Wade, F, Sr., Kansas State

Season Highlights

• Texas Tech tied Kansas State for the regular season title, ending Kansas’s 14-year string of Big 12 championships. The Red Raiders also very nearly won the national title, advancing all the way to the championship game before falling to Virginia in overtime.
• Texas won the NIT, its second title in that tourney and first since 1978. The Longhorns also gave the Big 12 two of the last three winners of the NIT.
• The Big 12 was the top-rated conference in the NCAA’s new NET ranking. Including the previously used RPI, it marked the fifth time in six years that the league has led the NCAA’s metric. Eight of the Big 12’s ten teams posted overall winning records, and all eight of them won at least 20 games.
• Texas Tech sophomore Jarrett Culver was a consensus second team All-American. Kansas junior Dedric Lawson also was a consensus third team All-American. Lawson also ranked second in NCAA Division I with 22 double-doubles, while Texas Tech’s Davide Moretti was second in free throw percentage (92.4%), Iowa State’s Tyrese Haliburton was second in assist-to-turnover ratio (4.46:1) and TCU’s Alex Robinson was third in assists (254).
• Texas Tech ranked second in the nation in field goal percentage defense (37.0%) and third in scoring defense (59.5 points per game allowed). West Virginia also was third in the country in offensive rebounds per game (14.58).

What we expected, and it happened: Many predicted a big year for Kansas State, with five starters back from an Elite Eight team the year before. After a shaky non-conference showing, the Wildcats heated up in the Big 12 and shared the regular season title with Texas Tech and, just as importantly, not with rival Kansas.

What we expected, and it didn’t happen: Even with the loss of productive veterans Vladimir Brodziansky and Kenrich Williams, TCU looked poised for a return to the NCAA Tournament and more importantly looked like a program on stable footing under Jamie Dixon. Cracks started to form around the program, though, with up-and-down play on the court and also a rash of transfers.

What we didn’t expect, and it happened: Maybe others saw it coming, but from here, it was a real surprise seeing West Virginia fall so far, so fast after four straight NCAA Tournament trips, three of those four ending in the Sweet 16. On the positive side, Oklahoma showed no drop-off whatsoever after the loss of Trae Young, and in fact might’ve been an even better team as it was right back in the NCAA Tournament. And, of course, Texas Tech’s stirring rise to being nothing less than one of the top teams in the country was a stunner for many, coming from a team picked to finish seventh in the Big 12 preseason poll.

Team on the rise: Texas Tech. Chris Beard has proven in very short time to be among the top coaches in the country. When it comes to executing a specific style of play and finding the talent to play it, he has few peers.

Team on the decline: West Virginia. The Mountaineers were so relentless and threw so many waves of players at opponents in recent years that it was a big jarring seeing them reduced to a relative shadow of those teams, a struggling squad that even got beaten soundly at home by Coastal Carolina in the College Basketball Invitational. Injuries, suspensions, dismissals and inconsistency were the marks of a team that had no player start more than 24 of WVU’s 36 games.

2019-20 Big 12 Outlook
There’s a chance that this past year may have been the end of a run, and the Big 12 could slip from its recent perch at the top of the conference ranks. Many of the main players making headlines in 2019-20 will be different. As many as 12 of the 15 members of the all-conference teams could depart. Still, too many programs in the Big 12 are too established, have too good of coaches, and have too many scheduling advantages for the league to fall flat.

From the returning talent, the team to keep an eye on will be Baylor, which will bring back essentially four starters and is loaded up on more transfers, too. A byproduct of Kansas’s relative struggles this past year is the Jayhawks should retain more of their talented freshmen than some might have expected a year ago. Udoka Azubuike’s return from injury will be big, too. Texas Tech has entered Virginia territory; no matter how impressive the Red Raiders’ returning cast may be, expect them to reside in the top 25 at the least, and possibly well up the polls again.

Iowa State, Kansas State, Texas and TCU all return significant contributors but also will suffer some substantial losses. The Longhorns might wind up the chic pick to be best of that group, but what in their collective nine-games-above-.500 last five years would make one trust the Horns to break out? We would trust Iowa State and TCU first. Oklahoma, too. The Sooners lose a ton-eight seniors in all-but do have two of its top three leading scorers (Brady Manek and Christian Doolittle) and, most importantly, Lon Kruger. West Virginia will be better. Most will expect Oklahoma State to be, too.

Faces will change, but the end result likely won’t for the Big 12, which has wisely resisted itches to overexpand and has reaped the rewards with a solid 10-team league where everyone is only a year or two from the NCAA Tournament, no matter how dour things may look at the moment. All ten Big 12 teams have appeared in the NCAAs at least once since 2017, and nine of the ten were there at least one of the last two years. (And it would’ve been all ten if Oklahoma State hadn’t been one of the first teams out in 2018.)

Twitter: @HoopvilleAdam