Kansas State, Oklahoma State take diverging paths in Big 12 championship race after Cowboys fail first tests

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy has been one of the surest bets in college football over the past 15 years. The Cowboys have eight 10-win seasons since 2010 and a trip to the Big 12 Championship Game in 2023. The Cowboys had the second-most returning production in the Big 12 heading into 2024 and were considered a leading title contender. 

That’s what makes this start so damaging. The No. 20 Cowboys got boatraced 42-20 against No. 23 Kansas State to drastically shift their place in the Big 12 title race. Suddenly, the chances of getting into the College Football Playoff as an at-large are all but extinguished. The pathway to the Big 12 Championship Game is substantially more difficult. 

Granted, these first two games of the Big 12 slate for Oklahoma State were always the most difficult. The Cowboys got Big 12 preseason favorite Utah in the opener  (a 22-19 loss) and immediately went on the road at Kansas State. The Wildcats, picked No. 2 in the preseason conference poll, needed to bounce back after losing to BYU one week ago. OSU was a late rally against Utah away from losing the two games by a combined 66-23. 

There are still plenty of winnable games left on the schedule for Oklahoma State, but the matchups against conference title contenders showed where the Cowboys stand. There’s an unbelievable microscope on the Big 12’s marquee games. The race for the championship game will be perhaps the most competitive in college football. Last season, the Big 12 had to release clarifications each week on its tiebreaker rules because the semantics were so complicated. 

In two of the last three years, a team that finished 7-2 in the Big 12 standings missed out on the Big 12 title game — Oklahoma in both 2021 and 2023, the latter of which whiffed after…

Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/kansas-state-oklahoma-state-take-diverging-paths-in-big-12-championship-race-after-cowboys-fail-first-tests/

Author : Shehan Jeyarajah

Publish date : 2024-09-28 21:04:56

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.