Big 12 football media days kicked off on Tuesday, and with the season less than two months away, there’s always a ton of hype about what’s coming to the conference this upcoming season. Here are my takeaways from Day 2 in Frisco.
Peace Over Steak
Business meetings can happen almost anywhere, from an office, hotel, or, if you are in Fort Worth, Texas, a steakhouse. On Tuesday morning, news broke that Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark joined a host of Texas Tech officials at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, including board members and major boosters Cody Campbell and Dusty Womble, as well as the school’s president and athletic director, Lawrence Schovanec and Kirby Hocutt.
While we don’t know specific details of that meeting over a hunk of steak, it’s likely that the two sides were trying to bury the hatchet over the whole Brendan Sorsby situation. I am sure there were other conversations about the future of the conference and college athletics, but it seemed more like a peace offering than a good cut of meat. How the meeting went remains unknown, but it doesn’t appear to me that the Big 12 has a problem with Texas Tech.
Scott Satterfield Calls out Texas Tech
Just when you think the Brendan Sorsby thing is over, Cincinnati head coach Scott Satterfield decided to throw a little gasoline on a fire that was trying to go out. On Wednesday, Satterfield said Texas Tech was among several schools that may have “reached out” to Sorsby’s camp in a perceived attempt to induce him to enter the transfer portal before the end of the 2025 season.
“We had already heard that schools had reached out — Texas Tech in particular had already reached out — with four games left,” Satterfield told The Athletic’s Chris Vannini. “So we knew we wouldn’t be able to compete financially with that, so we’d started looking for quarterbacks. … (After the season), he knew that if we tried to come up with money to pay him, we weren’t going to have enough for other positions. Wished him good luck, and that was it.”
Noah Fifita is Eyeing a Title, Not the Heisman
Coming in as one of, if not the best, quarterbacks in the Big 12 is Arizona’s Noah Fifita. After a down year in 2024, Fifita came back last season with a vengeance. He’s thrown for over 9,000 yards in his career and is coming off a year in which he threw for a career-high 3,228 yards. His 29 touchdown passes broke the program’s single-season record, and his 73 touchdown passes are more than any other active player in the country.
Arizona wasn’t shy about pushing its Heisman campaign for 2026. However, Fifita has his eyes set on something else, a Big 12 championship. “It’s not about a Heisman campaign. It’s about a Big 12 Championship … We have the people to go do it,” Fifita said. “The reason I came back was to do something that has never been done in Arizona history, and that’s to go win a Big 12 Championship.”
Jimmy Rogers Isn’t Into Rebuilding
It’s no secret that new Iowa State head coach Jimmy Rogers has his work cut out for him. After longtime coach Matt Campbell left, many of his players went with him to Happy Valley and elsewhere.
The roster was bare when Rogers took over in December, and he had to hit the transfer portal hard this offseason. In fact, Iowa State has the second-most incoming transfers in the Big 12, with a total of 53 new players from the portal.
Some may call it a rebuild, which is fine, but don’t tell Jimmy Rogers that. “To say that this is a rebuilding year, I don’t think anybody in the NFL says that, and they have a new roster every year. I don’t buy into that”, Rogers said.
That is certainly an interesting way to look at things after such a massive roster overhaul. Now the big question is, how will it look on the field and how competitive will this team be in 2026?
