The Bearded Texan/Big XII Friday

Good Friday evening my friends! I hope you all had wonderful holidays and happy New Year celebrations. As you can see this is not my normal day and with a new year comes new things. From here on out I will be stationed on Friday and I look forward to capping my week with you all. One other change I want to mention that may be the biggest of them both. One of the things I love living in Texas is the fact that we have a diverse yet fanatical fan base of many sports. I will not stand on any soapboxes and proclaim this as the greatest sports state/cities in all of America, having tremendous respect from Boston to L.A. and their sports histories, but I want to provide a perspective through Texan eyes when it comes to our teams, sports, and issues of the current day. My fellow Big XII mates – this does not mean I will politely shove what I have done and will be doing to the side, but rather this allows me to be myself even more so and show that many of us are very diverse in our passion towards sports. Is football the absolute king in Texas…well yeah, but did you know I, along with many others, am absolutely mad about the NHL and Dallas Stars hockey? As you will read and discover this summer from another fellow Texan, is that MLB baseball is beloved (AL West/NFC East writer, Jason) and when it comes to the NBA and playoffs there will be 3 teams represented from the Lone Star State unless San Antonio for some weird reason doesn’t get their act together.

In the end of this, I would just like feedback from my readers and to know what they really think of this idea after the next few weeks.

Now regarding the Big XII bowl season….

I give it a giant F as in Failure!! What does this mean for next season? We are terrible, there is no hope or future for this league!

Whoa, easy there cowboy. Yes it was a bad bowl season for the Big XII, but it is not the be all/end all for anything regarding the future of the conference. Also it was not as terrible as it was perceived unless you were a Texas or Oklahoma fan. So I’ll give a quick breakdown of what I saw at the end.

The Good: TCU came out and absolutely dominated, playing inspired and showing the committee that they deserved to be playing the the CFB Playoff, even with Ohio State winning their game. They should be top 3 to start next season, returning 10/11 offensive starters…Baylor, football Karma is a tough cookie. Beat TCU after being down 20 late, fall to Michigan State after being up 20 — late. Yet despite that they showed they belong among the top programs in the nation and if they pick the right replacement for Petty, then they won’t skip a beat in 2015…Oklahoma State, you have found your man at QB! I was thoroughly impressed by the true freshman and the end of the season job done by Mike Gundy. You have a lot to look forward to next year and should be competing for the conference title next year.
The Bad: Kansas State underperformed and seemed to fade at the end of the year. I know UCLA is a great football team, but I expected Coach Snyder’s team to come out more inspired. They were flat and it cost them in the end. Speaking of Snyder, what was up with Jim Mora Jr. and his post-game handshake? Completely disrespectful to one the classiest guys on the planet, what a shame…West Virginia, what happened? What started so promising this season peaked with the upset of Baylor and it was literally downhill from there. I know Trickett wasn’t right and has since retired, like David Ash, due to concussions but what this proved at the end is that Howard is not the answer(for now) at QB. I love Holgrosen so I don’t expect him to struggle finding that mojo again next year.
The UGLY and I mean UGLY: Oklahoma and Texas, all I ask is if you get invitations to December bowls, please kindly turn them down. These were not power schools or even over-powering offenses/defenses, yet you…just…oh forget about it. It was an incredibly ugly 24 hours for the conferences two biggest and storied members. If neither team can find a capable QB, then expect to fall even further behind the “New Powers”.

Final Rankings

TCU Horned Frogs
Baylor Bears
Kansas State Wildcats
Oklahoma State Cowboys
West Virginia Mountaineers
Texas Longhorns/
Oklahoma Sooners
Texas Tech Red Raiders
Kansas Jayhawks
Iowa State Cyclones

One more note for the night and I will begin to delve deeper into this next week: Big XII basketball is absolutely dominating this year. It has been the best conference all season and I am looking forward to more conference play and March Madness. Outside of Kentucky, I can see the Big XII bringing home the title this year.

Follow Justin on Twitter @JustinNeely