Updated Big 12 football power rankings, per ESPN's initial 2026 SP+

ESPN's college football analytics guru, Bill Connelly, released his first SP+ rankings for the upcoming 2026 college football season on Friday. The metric is one of the go-to predictive measures heading into the college football season. Like any metric, it will change when real data (games) takes place.

Still, SP+ is the industry standard for judging team quality and projecting future performance. Here is how Connelly explains his process: As a reminder, SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking.

Along those same lines, these projections aren't intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather. The Big 12 landscape gained further clarity with the release of the SP+ and Connelly's updated returning production earlier this week.

In 2025, Texas Tech was the lone conference representative in the College Football Playoff while BYU and Utah were the clear next-best teams. Arizona and Houston surprised with a nine and ten-win season, respectively. We can now head back to the drawing board to project which teams are this year's breakout candidates and who might take a step back.