There are still three games to go for both teams, and if we’ve learned anything about the Big 12 Conference this season it’s that all five of those games – only five because Kansas and Texas play each other — absolutely can go either way.
With that in mind, however, it’s probably not too early to start looking ahead to how the Big 12 handles its tiebreaker rules for postseason seeding.
Most of you surely know by now that if two or more teams are tied at the top with the same record at the end of the regular season, each of them is declared the Big 12 regular season champion. They get the trophies. They can hang the banner. They’re all the champs.
But not all of them can be the top seed in the Big 12’s postseason tournament.
That’s where the tiebreaker rules come into play.
Believe it or not, the Big 12 has fairly extensive plans in place in the event of a tie between any number of teams at the end of the regular season.
There are plans for a tie at the top between two teams, which we’ll look at more closely in a minute. And there are also plans for ties involving multiple teams, as well as a series of plans for what’s known as an unbalanced tiebreaker, both between two teams and multiple teams.
The unbalanced format came into play during the recent seasons impacted by COVID-19 and it accounts for teams playing a different number of games and uses adjusted winning percentage to determine seeding.
Enough about all of that, though. Let’s get to the tiebreaker scenarios for two teams, which is most likely what we will see this season if there winds up being a tie at the top.
The first tiebreaker is head-to-head matchups.
So, as of now, in order to avoid losing out on the tiebreaker, KU would need to beat Texas in Austin on March 4. Of course, if that happens, it significantly increases KU’s chances of winning the league outright. But, if the Jayhawks slip up against either West Virginia or Texas Tech, they could need to beat Texas to secure a tie.
If the teams that are tied at the top split the regular season series, we got to the second tiebreaker, which is each team’s regular season record against the team in third place in the Big 12 standings. If that’s a tie — like, if they both went 2-0 or 0-2 or split with the team in third — then you go down to the team in fourth place and then fifth place and then sixth place and so on until one team lands an advantage.
If that winds up tied all the way through 10th place, then you go to the next tiebreaker.
The next step, tiebreaker No. 3, is a comparison of the teams’ conference road records.
As things stand today, both KU and UT have three Big 12 road losses. But, if it gets to this step, it could be advantage Kansas, especially because Texas still has two more road games to play — at Baylor on Saturday and at TCU next week — and KU just has the one, at Texas in the regular season finale.
If the Longhorns drop at least one of their next road games, they would need to defeat Kansas at home in order to remain alive through this tiebreaker. If that’s how it plays out, UT likely would need to win that KU game anyway just to force the tie in the first place.
Tiebreaker No. 4 is essentially a combination of tiebreaker No. 2 and tiebreaker No. 3 and it takes into account each team’s road record against the next highest teams in the final regular season standings.
As an example, if Kansas and Texas finish tied and we get to this scenario with K-State finishing third in the conference standings, Texas would win this tiebreaker because the Longhorns won in Manhattan and KU lost.
Both teams lost in Ames, Iowa, and we know KU already lost at Baylor. A Texas loss at Baylor this weekend would eliminate the need for this tiebreaker, though, because it would be settled by tiebreaker No. 3, with KU having no more than four road losses and Texas having five.
If after all of this, it’s still tied — which is nearly impossible to imagine as things stand today — the top seed would be decided by a draw.
According to the Big 12 rules, the drawing would be conducted in public or with media in attendance. The schools involved in the drawing — essentially picking a name out of a hat — would be allowed to have a representative in attendance at the drawing. And the drawing would be executed by putting a single slip of paper with the name or logo of each school into a container and pulling one out.
The one that gets pulled gets the 1 seed. The other is the 2 seed.
