While Bill Self and the Kansas Jayhawks will likely enter the 2024-25 season as the preseason No. 1 overall team, three other schools from the Big 12 Conference are expected to join them in the Top Five.
Baylor, Houston, Kansas, and Iowa State are all currently listed in the Top Five of Jon Rothstein’s Top 45 list, and with the league continuing to separate itself from the rest of the field, Kansas head coach Bill Self made sure to highlight it in a recent interview.
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“You look at it, Houston could be a preseason Top Five team,” Self said. “Iowa State could be a preseason Top Five team. Baylor could be a preseason Top Five team. We could be a preseason Top Five team, and oh yeah, you add Arizona to that. And that doesn’t include everybody else that is so good and so competitive, and I may have left somebody out, but it’s going to be a monster of a league.”
While the Big 12 Conference has put itself in the best position to thrive in the modern era of college basketball, league commissioner Brett Yormark deserves a lot of credit for adding the “Four Corner” schools and for his increased focus on building the brand of Big 12 Basketball.
