We know that the Arizona State Sun Devils are off to the newly expanded, 12-team College Football Playoff as the first winner of the expanded Big 12 era, with head coach Kenny Dillingham leading the Tempe university to a 45-19 win over Iowa State in the Big 12 title game over the weekend.
The Sun Devils reached AT&T Stadium after winning the conference’s tiebreaker over the Colorado Buffaloes and BYU Cougars, who also finished 7-2 in conference play but found themselves on the outside looking in at ASU and Iowa State on Dec. 7.
Still, Deion Sanders’ team finished tied with BYU for the biggest year-over-year gridiron glow-up across a handful of metrics that BetColorado.com used its Colorado sports betting experts to determine which Big 12 programs saw the biggest jump in 2024, ranking behind the Sun Devils in the 16-team conference.
The regular season has ended. As we head into bowl season and the College Football Playoff, BetColorado.com wanted to see which teams in the Big 12 had the best year-over-year improvement. Using Sports-Reference.com, we pulled the in-conference winning percentage and Simple Rating System (SRS), which takes average point differential and strength of schedule into account, for each team in the current Big 12 from last season and this season. We then ranked the teams based on the greatest improvement within the conference based on the average ranking for both data points.
Best YoY Big 12 Improvement
Rank | Team | Avg. Rank |
1 | Arizona State Sun Devils | 1.5 |
T-2 | Colorado Buffaloes | 2.5 |
T-2 | BYU Cougars | 2.5 |
4 | Baylor Bears | 3 |
5 | Cincinnati Bearcats | 5.5 |
T-6 | Houston Cougars | 7 |
T-6 | Iowa State Cyclones | 7 |
T-6 | TCU Horned Frogs | 7 |
9 | Texas Tech Red Raiders | 9.5 |
10 | UCF Knights | 10 |
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Where CU Ranked in Big 12 Improvement
Across the league, CU’s jump from going 4-8 in 2023 to 9-3 in 2024 put them behind ASU in terms of the biggest year-over-year jumps in terms of win totals, as the Sun Devils went from 3-9 a year ago to 11-2 this season, while the BYU Cougars also saw a +5 win total improvement year-over-year, going from 5-7 in their first Big 12 campaign to 10-2 this fall.
That win total jump is part of the reason why the Buffaloes ranked in a tie with the Cougars for second in the Big 12 in year-over-year improvement, with an average rank of 2.5, compared with ASU’s average of 1.5, with CU ranking ahead of conference foes like Baylor (3 average rank), Cincinnati (5.5 average rank), Houston, Iowa State and TCU (7 average rank), Texas Tech (9.5 average rank) and UCF (10 average rank).
None of that takes away from the fact that Colorado is in a bowl game for the first time in a 12-game season since 2016, when head coach Mike MacIntyre led the Buffs’ to a 10-4 season that ended with a 38-8 shellacking at the hands of the Oklahoma State Cowboys in San Antonio.
This year, Sanders and his players will look to earn CU the program’s first bowl win since the 2004 Houston Bowl, when the Buffs’ beat UTEP, 33-28, to cap off an 8-5 season, when the Big 12 program squares off against BYU in an intra-conference version of the Valero Alamo Bowl on Dec. 28.
For now, what we know is that oddsmakers from Bet365 Colorado have the Buffaloes down as a three-point favorite over the Cougars in San Antonio, with a -150 moneyline on the Boulder institution, compared with +125 odds on the LDS university from Provo.
Author
Christopher Boan has been covering sports and sports betting for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.
