The big 2014 Big 12 football guide, from Kansas to Oklahoma

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Nine fumbles, nine recoveries. I can’t get past it.

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Change is the watchword in the Big 12, which, along with its six-program conference realignment turnover, has seen five different conference champions in five years. But for college football as a whole, the best predictors of this year’s outcomes are last year’s outcomes. If you’ve been good, you’ll probably be good again, and vice versa.

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I often say that hard jobs remain hard. No matter how much you’ve succeeded and no matter how many big moments you’ve had, college football has a very staid, conservative ecosystem. The programs with the most resources and deepest histories and largest alumni bases remain those, and if you’re trying to win at a school without those things, you will always be walking uphill.

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There are two ways to win at a school like Texas. Either you hire a CEO type, someone who will glad-hand, politic, land whichever recruits he wants, figure out the system from there, and leave the micro details to his assistants. Basically, you could go the Mack Brown route.

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We’ve completed the circle.

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Depending on how you want to look at it, West Virginia is on one of two slides, both of them relatively severe.

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The Big 12 is a strange entity. For each set of conference previews, I determine the order of teams, bottom to top, based on five-year history. It’s generally a decent way of determining overall program health, and it gives a more general view than simply using last year’s rankings or coming up with a hierarchy for 2014 (when I haven’t usually figured out the hierarchy until I’m done with all of the conference’s previews). For most conferences, this makes sense. The last (top) four previews in the ACC series were Miami, Clemson, Virginia Tech and Florida State. The last four for the Big Ten were Nebraska, Michigan State, Wisconsin and Ohio State.