No poll, no problem for West Virginia, others in Big 12
The Big 12 Conference will not conduct a preseason media poll this season.
It’s a move that will unquestionably make the league’s two-day media day event that kicks off July 8 a little less compelling just by removing that talking point from the docket.
That’s especially true with all of the other changes going on across the sport at a national level and the fact that realignment is currently on the back burner for the Big 12.
The league’s media poll has long been a hot point of discussion just as much, if not more, than the initial depth chart that’s often attached to the media guides for teams around the time of the event.
But much like how those depth charts are becoming harder and harder to come by, the listing of the league’s 16 teams has now gone the way of the dinosaur.
In the end, the projections are just that – projections. A collection of media members across the league that slot the teams in order based on how they are perceived in the pre-season. But in actuality, the results of the poll have no bearing on how teams will finish.
West Virginia proved that in 2023 when the Mountaineers were picked dead last in the 14-team Big 12 and went on to finish 9-4 under then-head coach Neal Brown. It happened yet again last season when last-place Arizona State managed to overcome being slotted last in the 16-team league to win the Big 12 and advance to the College Football Playoff.
An argument could be made that those slights helped to propel both of those teams through the off-season as a point of motivation. West Virginia certainly didn’t hide that at the time.
But in the end, the media poll is just another arbitrary list in an endless sea of them out there.
This isn’t an argument for or against the practice as at worst it provides a snapshot of how the league’s media is looking at each program at this point in July. But given the massive amounts of roster turnover at each school yearly, it’s made those projections more and more difficult to make.
For example, West Virginia has 75 new players this season on the roster and only a handful of returning players, forget starters. That makes trying to predict and project how things could unfold under a new coaching staff increasingly difficult.
Looking at other lists, the expectation is that West Virginia will be slotted toward the bottom of the league but again is that an actual shifting through each roster or just a collection of the surface data?
The Big 10 also doesn’t conduct a pre-season media poll and it wouldn’t be surprising to see more leagues follow suit in the future in order to avoid setting expectations. That’s always been important, but perhaps more than ever with college football playoff spots up for grabs and likely even more in the future when the eventual expansion model is selected.
It’s fun to guess just where West Virginia could be slotted and I think it would be a reasonable projection to say somewhere between in the bottom fourth of the league given many of the things that we have already outlined above. But all that will matter is the results of the actual games this fall.
And even without the Big 12 media poll to serve as a pre-season guide, all of that is still very much out there for every single team in the league, including the Mountaineers.
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