Monday Down South: The Ultimate Big 12 Preview: Only one thing can end Oklahoma’s reign …

Editor’s note: This is a special edition of Matt Hinton’s “Monday Down South” column and part of his continuing 2021 college football preview.

The Big 12: It’s still here.

As mission statements go, it ain’t much. But for now, amid the latest round of speculation over the league’s pending demise – or, at minimum, its likely demotion in the national food chain – it’ll have to do. According to the contracts, the current membership is locked in until 2025, when Oklahoma and Texas are officially bound for the SEC. In reality, the notion the Sooners and Longhorns will still be playing under the Big 12 banner in a year, two at most, is a fantasy only the lawyers are obligated to recognize. In the meantime, whatever happens on the field is a mere footnote to the high legal, financial and fraternal drama unfolding off it.

And yes, sorry to say we’re still very much on the front end of all that. At this point, it’s still hard to imagine what a constellation of schools with very little in the way of shared history or success will look like without the gravitational pull of its two undisputed heavyweights at the center, or whether it will manage to hold together at all. Right from the start, the Big 12 was conceived and executed as a made-for-TV marriage of convenience formed in response to evolving economic realities in the mid-1990s, and much like the old Southwest Conference then, as the landscape continues to shift it looks more and more like a quaint regional anachronism in an increasingly national enterprise. As far as TV is concerned, Oklahoma and Texas are the only brands that matter.

Unlike the SWC, the rump Big 12 minus OU and UT (not to mention Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Texas A&M, which saw the writing on the wall a decade ago) doesn’t have simple geography or eight decades of tradition working in its favor. It has 25 years of mistrust and upheaval.

But there’s all kinds of time over the coming months and (ugh) years to make sense of the ongoing chaos and angst. Right now, the Big 12 is playing actual football this fall, and the product on the field ought to be more than compelling enough to justify its existence.

Oklahoma, owner of the past 6 conference championships, has just barely managed to extend the streak the past 2 years by razor-thin margins, hinting at the Sooners’ vulnerability; it also returns more talent in 2021 than any OU team of the Playoff era, hinting at potentially their most serious national run in more than a decade. Iowa State, a perennial also-ran more than a century removed from its last conference title, is essentially the exact same team that pushed Oklahoma to the brink in 2020 en route to a top-10 finish. Texas, having largely given up on acquiring the technology to reverse the earth’s orbit in an effort to reset the calendar to 2005, will move forward with one of the game’s most respected offensive minds and its usual stable of young talent.

TCU and Oklahoma State remain steady, reliable winners with latent dark horse potential under two of the nation’s longest-tenured head coaches. Kansas State is still an endearingly old-school outfit delivering on its quota of exactly one notable upset per year. Baylor’s roller-coaster trajectory is back on the upswing. Even Kansas, a bastion of futility, has a kind of rubbernecking appeal as one of the most fascinating trainwrecks in all of sports.

Does any part of that point toward long-term cohesion or viability of the league as a whole? Is this specific assortment of schools taking the field for the last time under the same banner? Is the season destined to unfold in the face of a looming cloud of doom? We’ll find out soon enough. None of that, though, has any bearing on the players striving to seize their moment, or the shape of the conference race, or the games themselves. And it’s certainly no excuse to appreciate them any less.

The front-runner: Oklahoma

I realize how tempting it is to dismiss Oklahoma’s national championship ambitions out of hand. The Sooners 0-4 in the Playoff, the most recent losses coming in especially grisly fashion at the hands of Alabama and LSU – games in which they trailed at the half 31-10 and 49-14, respectively, and hardly looked like they belonged on the same field. Under Lincoln Riley, they’ve taken a step in the wrong direction each of the past 3 seasons. Last year, they were bounced from the Playoff discussion almost immediately courtesy of early, back-to-back losses to Kansas State and Iowa State. Although they plugged the leaks in time to reclaim the Big 12 title in the end, it was the first time since Riley was promoted to head coach that defending the conference crown felt like the highest rung on the ladder.

But sell the 2021 edition short at your own risk. The 8-game winning streak to close the season pointed toward a young team finding itself: Decisive wins over OU’s chief rivals, Texas and Oklahoma State; redemption vs. ISU in the Big 12 Championship Game; an outright humiliation of Florida in the Cotton Bowl. More importantly, virtually everyone who mattered in that run is back, including face-of-the-program QB Spencer Rattler (see below), rising stars Marvin Mims and Theo Wease at wideout, and the vast majority of the two-deep from the best defense of Riley’s tenure, by far.

Given its well-earned reputation for bursting into flames on a regular basis, that last point is worth emphasizing: Oklahoma has a defense. Entering his third year on staff, coordinator Alex Grinch has done the job he was hired to do, elevating a notoriously sketchy unit into the top 30 nationally last year in total defense (29th), scoring defense (28th), rushing defense (9th), pass efficiency defense (9th), yards per play allowed (26th), first downs allowed (25th), takeaways (18th), 3rd-down conversions (4th) and tackles for loss (10th). The d-line, arguably the most glaring deficiency under Grinch’s maligned predecessor, Mike Stoops, suddenly looks like the kind of bona fide strength the other national heavies take for granted.

Combine that with a standard-issue Lincoln Riley offense, and you’ve got – on paper, anyway – close to a perfect storm. Oklahoma’s much too consistent to pull the old “if not now, when?” routine. So let’s just say however many opportunities await in the future, not many of them figure to be better than this one.

The challenger: Iowa State

Future as a “power” program notwithstanding, these are high times for Iowa State. The 2020 Cyclones tied a school record for wins (9) and posted the best conference record (8-2) in the 123-year history of the program. They played in their first Big 12 Championship Game (a close loss to Oklahoma) and their first major bowl game (a win over Oregon in the Fiesta). They spent 3 weeks inside the AP Top 10, more than all previous ISU teams combined, and earned their highest poll finish by far — No. 9, 10 spots better than the previous high in 1976. Head coach Matt Campbell, who wasn’t even born in 1976, ended his fifth season in Ames with the best overall winning percentage (.556) of anyone who’s held the job.

So, in that context, it’s not just your standard bit of blue-sky preseason patter when we tell you that their best may still be ahead of them. Almost everyone who mattered last year is back, beginning with Campbell, who spurned NFL overtures in favor of a contract extension, as well as longtime coordinators Tom Manning (offense) and Jon Heacock (defense). The lineup is essentially intact, including 9 players who were voted first-team All-Big 12 by league coaches representing every position group on both sides of the ball. Among them: The most decorated quarterback in ISU history (senior Brock Purdy), the nation’s leading rusher (All-American Breece Hall), and the conference leaders in receptions (WR Xavier Hutchinson), tackles (LB Mike Rose), and sacks (DE Will McDonald IV). For the first time since… well, ever, the Cyclones must be taken seriously as Big 12 contenders.

Will it be the last time? Another big season will send Campbell’s stock into the stratosphere, and the exodus of core talent at year’s end could be the perfect moment to declare “mission accomplished” and make the leap, whether it’s to the next level or to a more traditional power with a fresh vacancy. (Michigan, hello.) If he’s in it for the long haul at Iowa State, he can’t count on having another team that checks as many boxes as this one again anytime soon. Either way, at a place that hasn’t claimed so much as a share of a conference title since 1912, the window to win big right now is much too rare to take for granted.

The dark horse: Texas

Let’s go ahead and get this out the way: Texas is Not Back, folks.

Not yet, anyway. The Longhorns are nobody’s favorite in the Big 12 and barely cracked the Top 25 in the preseason AP poll. (At No. 21, they’re actually starting out a couple of spots below where they finished last year.) Tom Herman left the program better than he found it — not saying much there — but never threatened Oklahoma at the top of the conference and lost ground relative to Texas A&M and out-of-state powers making successful inroads in Texas recruiting. In the past 3 recruiting classes, Texas signed just 2 of the state’s top 10 prospects in 2019, 3 of the top 10 in 2020, and only 1 of the top 25 in-state prospects in 2021. The most highly touted Texas high school quarterback since Vince Young decided he’d rather begin his career as a backup at Ohio State than compete for a wide-open starting job in Austin, which should tell you all you need to know about UT’s place in the world right now.

All of that said, to the extent the Longhorns are optimistic about Year 1 under Steve Sarkisian, it’s not hard to understand why. First, there’s Sarkisian himself, whose exemplary tour in the Nick Saban Career Rehabilitation Program restored his reputation as an elite play-caller and a straight arrow following a sordid exit from his last head-coaching gig at USC. He was the hottest name on the offseason market and probably the only realistic candidate who could have justified turning the page from Herman coming off a 25-12 record over the past 3 years. (Although in the end there was clearly much more to Herman’s departure than just wins and losses.) Sark also inherited the kind of blue-chip skill talent on offense that he has a track record exploiting to great effect. Sophomore RB Bijan Robinson was the No. 1 back in the 2020 class, broke out in a big way late in his freshman campaign, and may be the closest equivalent in college football this season to recent Alabama great Najee Harris.

Bijan Robinson is the future. #Hookem #ThisIsTexas pic.twitter.com/IsqFfBGoXQ

— Hookem Football (@hornsfootball) November 7, 2020

As ever, nothing is easier this time of year than falling into the “Texas is just a quarterback away” trap, because, well, it’s usually the truth. Between junior Casey Thompson and sophomore Hudson Card, a drop-off from 4-year starter Sam Ehlinger — a Hall-of-Fame example of a solid, productive college QB who’s so overexposed throughout his career he winds up being weirdly underrated — is not a given. (More on that competition below.) But then, this was already an offense that averaged 42.7 points per game last year and topped 30 in 2 of its 3 losses. Just matching that number will be an achievement, and it won’t necessarily show up in the win column unless there’s a great leap forward on the other side of the ball.

The upstart: Baylor

The Bears were undeniably awful in Dave Aranda’s first season as head coach, limping to a 2-7 record while failing to top 23 points in 6 of 9 games. Not great. But Baylor, more than any other major program over the decade, is accustomed to the boom-and-bust cycle that follows a coaching change. In 2017, Aranda’s predecessor, Matt Rhule, took over an operation barely removed from its Briles-era heyday but still reeling from the scandal that cost Briles his job. He proceeded to hit bottom, nose-diving to a 1-11 finish in his first season; in Year 2, the Bears made the leap to 7-6, and by Year 3 brought the project full circle by turning in an 11-1 regular season. The crash in Aranda’s debut may have been even steeper, but in many ways, it was recognizable as the same awkward first step in the process.

Of course, the team Aranda inherited wasn’t decimated by sanctions or a scandal that wiped out half the roster. It was, however, hit hard by attrition from the 2019 Sugar Bowl team, a classic “get out while the gettin’s good” scenario. And it was competitive, playing 6 of their 7 losses within 14 points and 3 of them within a touchdown, the mark of a team that wasn’t as bad as its record and doesn’t have far to go to make a few dents in the win column. To that end, the Bears have settled on a quarterback, redshirt junior Gerry Bohanon, who — along with most of the two-deep — has been a part of both the rise under Rhule and the subsequent plunge as he enters his fourth year in the program.

Mulligan or not, the jury remains out on Aranda as a head coach as he makes the move from widely respected coordinator to the top job. Still, he took the Baylor job over other opportunities for a reason, and nothing that happened in Year Zero should have any bearing on what it looks like from here on out.

The doormat: Kansas

Kansas is w