Big 12 vs ACC: Which is the Better Conference?

In this episode of First and 12, we tackle one of the biggest debates in college football: is the Big 12 or the ACC the stronger conference? With playoff bids, quarterback depth, and non-conference wins all on the table, we break down who’s rising and who’s riding reputation. From Florida State and Clemson to Kansas State and Utah, we compare talent, coaching, and performance to see which league is truly built for the new era of college football.

Keywords:
ACC vs Big 12 football, college football conference rankings, best football conference 2025, Big 12 strength, ACC power teams, conference realignment, playoff contenders, Florida State vs Texas Tech, Clemson football, Big 12 expansion impact

Transcript

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The Big 12 or the ACC, which is the better conference? We're going to figure that out on today's episode.[MUSIC PLAYING] From all of home, it'sake to Colorado, Arizona, Sake, Cincinnati. We've got Big 12 covered from end zone to buzzer beaters. This is first in 12. We're all access pass to all 16 teams. All in, every episode.[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to today's episode of First and 12. My name is Adam Gibby. Thank you so much for joining us. It really does mean a lot. Every single person who's listening, I appreciate it. Thank you. Let's get right into today's topic. So the last couple of years, the ACC and the Big 12 have been kind of fighting over the rights of being the third best conference. We know that the SEC is the top conference in the country. Are they overrated? Yes. I believe they absolutely are. If you want to hear more about that, check out yesterday's episode, where I went deep into the actual results of SEC play versus where the media, especially ESPN, likes to rank them. But the SEC still is the best conference, and there's very little arguments to that. The Big 10 comes at number two. Again, there's very little argument to that. They have some huge brands in Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State's big brand was constant, pretty big brand. I was a pretty big brand. But they also have a lot of really, really bad teams. Rutgers, for example, Northwestern, typically Indiana. But the Big 12 still, the second best conference, because of how top heavy they are, and how elite those top teams are. As far as the argument for number three and four, the ACC and Big 12 seem to kind of go back and forth. So I wanted to actually really break it down. I wanted to get a data-based decision on which conference is better. Now, I'm not sitting here today telling you that this is the end all answer, and that this is factually the truth. This is just my opinion based on facts and data that I looked up that I'm going to share with you and let you decide for yourself. Am I missing certain data points perhaps? But I think I'm covering them pretty well. When I looked at the ACC, when I looked at the Big 12, I looked at a lot of different factors looked at recent history, because I think that's what's most important, typically, sure there might be a little bit of a legacy kind of thing. Teams like Florida State have some legacy to them. But in today's modern era of college football sports in general, where the game is changing so much, the Florida State that had Bobby Boudon's, their head coach, is no longer the same Florida State program. There's NIL, there's the transfer portal, there's new conference members, schedule formats have changed. The college football playoff now exists. It's just a completely different sport outside of four downs, trying to score touchdown six points. I mean, all of that's still the same, but that's about it. Everything else has changed. Yeah, you kind of look at history, but it's not a huge determining factor for me when I'm looking at which conference is actually better. So I'm going to start off by reading the teams in each conference. Now, if you're a Big 12 fan, you obviously know all these 16 teams, but I'm going to read them anyways. I'm going to read them by how they finished in the standings last season. Arizona State, Iowa State, BYU, Colorado, Baylor, TCU, Texas Tech, Kansas State, West Virginia, Kansas, Cincinnati, Houston, Utah, Arizona, UCF and Oklahoma State. For the ACC, they have SMU, Clemson, Miami, Syracuse, Duke, Louisville, Georgia Tech, Boston College, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, North Carolina State, North Carolina, Virginia, California, Wake Forest, Stanford and Florida State. Now, the first area I want to look at is just reach. I have to give the ACC the advantage here. The ACC is one could argue the most national conference, despite being called the Atlantic Coastal Conference, which I find ironic. The ACC has teams two in California. They have a team in Texas, and then they have a bunch of teams on the East Coast, but because they have teams in California and Texas and Florida, they already have the three biggest hot bets for recruiting within their conference. They also have the New England area, and they have the whole Eastern seaboard. I think that this is an advantage for the ACC, even though if you're on the tennis team, if you're on the golf team, if you're on the track team, traveling from Stanford to go play Rutgers, sorry, Stanford having to travel to go play Pittsburgh or Wake Forest or Florida State doesn't make any sense. It's a huge economic loss, yet I still think it's an advantage. I think for every team who travels to California, they're able to recruit while they're there. And for anybody who thinks that when a team travels to play a sport, that they're only doing that, that's not true. When the football team travels, you know, when North Carolina travels to go play Stanford, they have coaches that are doing recruiting visits. They have coaches going to Friday night games and talking to players after the game to try to get them interested in playing for North Carolina. Now, is that a hard draw for a lot of kids? Absolutely, best for some kids. They love that. They love the Jordan brand. They want to get away from home. They want to experience different parts of the country. That's a great recruiting tool for a good percentage of students. It's for a good percentage of recruits. So if they happens when they go play SMU. Now, the only disadvantage to that is there is no real heart of the conference. There is, if you're going to draw on, it's going to be maybe in North Carolina, because you have, you know, North Carolina and see state and you have Duke all in that area, as well as Clemson, kind of close, Wake Forest. So that's sort of the heart of the conference, but there are some outliers. Again, there's only one school in Texas, but you do get in the Texas market. And again, that's huge. There's no state that produces talent like Texas does, particularly in college football. And so geographically, I got to give the advantage to the ACC when looking at the Big 12. The Big 12 is very spread out, but it's not necessarily the biggest markets. The biggest markets you have in the Big 12 are Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Denver, and Salt Lake. Now, I realize those aren't small markets per se, but you're not getting the California market. You're not really getting into the Florida market. Yes, you have UCF, but Florida is so oversaturated right now with talent that it's not necessarily, just again, with the size of Florida. No, yes, if you drive the Panhandle down to Miami, it's about 12 hours. But Florida is not the same size of California. And so when you get UCF, is that a good recruiting hobby? Yes, it is, but it's not the same as getting into California. In my personal opinion, at least. Besides that, you have a lot of really small markets. You have Ames, Iowa, Manhattan, Kansas, Lubbock, Texas, Morgan, town, West Virginia. Again, great football towns, beautiful football towns. And that's part of what makes the Big 12 so great is that you have the culture within the conference. But in terms of getting high school talent, you're just not going to get the same in Lubbock, Texas that you do in Southern California. You're not going to get the same in Manhattan, Kansas as you do in Tallahassee, Florida if you get kind of what I'm going with there. So again, I'm going to have to give the geographic locations a slight edge to the ACC, although I do think that there are some disadvantages to that as well, particularly for Call and Stanford, who are going across the country multiple times a year to play games. The next area I wanted to look at, and I think this one is really important is brands. And for the ACC, they kind of similar to the Big 10. They have a couple of really big brand names, and then they just have a lot of not great brand names. So go ahead and have the Big Brand names. Clemson, Miami and Florida State, they beat everybody in the Big 12. They just do. There's nobody in the Big 12 that if you were to ask the common fan who maybe doesn't watch college football religiously or follow the sport outside of their own local team, who's going to win, BYU or Clemson, Florida State or Iowa State, Miami or TCU. They're probably going to go with the ACC schools because they've heard of them more. They draw more eyes, they draw more media attention at least in recent history. And that is where sort of historic legacy comes in. Nobody is going to remember that Florida State finished dead last in the ACC in the year of 2020 because of what Bobby Bowden built and because of the legacy Florida State has. It's just a program that isn't known to have a terrible season. And so history does play particularly in this big brand role. Also Clemson has national championships recently. Miami was very strong, powerful in the early 2000s. If we're just going off of top brands, the ACC clears by far. Looking at the rest of the conference, though, I think the big 12 actually has the next biggest brands. BYU, Iowa State, TCU, Utah, and Oklahoma State feel like bigger brands than Louisville, Duke or SMU and Duke is all about basketball. Duke has so much influence in basketball that I think they're actually the fifth biggest brand within the ACC despite not having a great football team historically. And we know that football is what runs everything. The best teams, the biggest brands in the ACC. But then you have the next biggest brands within the big 12. And then when you look at the bottom of the big 12, I think for the big 12 as far as bottom dwellers, just teams that don't bring any punch, they don't have anything really. It's Cincinnati and Kansas. But Kansas has been improving and I feel they don't have exactly the negative stereotypes that they had only a couple of years ago. So I'm not sure I'd even throw them in there. They're maybe in the same range as UCF, which even they've had recent success. They're kind of on people's radar. Whereas the ACC has Virginia Wake Forest, Cal, Boston College, and again, Duke, football. So for that, the big 12 is better. So it really depends on what you value the most. Do you just value the top three or four markets? Do you just value the top three brands if you do as the ACC? But I think if you value the entire conference as a whole, it's the big 12. There's not as many bottom dwellers in the big 12 and the average team in the big 12 is probably a bigger brand than the average team in the ACC. So for that, I want to let you decide on what you think is actually better. The third category I wanted to look at was Bull Games. I know people like to downplay Bull Games. They're not important to cares. If you're not winning a national championship, you're not winning anything. But Bull Games still matter. When you look at TV ratings for Bull Games, people are still tuning in to watch Bull Games, unless you're planning the Bahamas Bowl or the Pinstry Bowl or the Who Know's Wet Bowl. But anytime the big 12 and ACC square off for you, P4 on P4, big Bull Games, people are tuning in. I mean, eight people, eight million people tuning in for the BYU Colorado Alamo Bull. And that was a big 12 versus big 12, essentially conference Bull Game. It was actually a third place game if you really wanted to break it down. So looking at recent years within the big 12, and I'm just going to go back the last two seasons. The reason for that is that the big 12 looks completely different than it did three years ago. You know, I don't think you can really go back three years when Texas and Oklahoma were in the league. And then the eight new members were not in the league. And then for the ACC SMU Stanford and Cal were in the league, I just don't feel like that's a fair thing to really look at. So I'm just going to look at the last two years. And I realize even realignment's happened within the last year. But we at least had some semblance of what the conferences look like within the past two years. So for the past two years, the big 12 went 98. They went four and four last year technically they went four and five BYU and Cal Rotto played each other. I'm not going to really give Colorado a loss for that. I feel had Colorado gotten a fair shake at it and played a different team. We may have had a five and three kind of year. I'm not going to count that against them. So 98 overall, the ACC went two and 11 last. Now you could say they made 13 Bull Games. The big 12 only made nine. But y'all said to remember the ACC only plays a conference games. And also the bottom of the ACC was much worse than the bottom of the big 12. In the ACC, there were multiple teams who only had a one or two wins within the conference. And in the big 12, there was only one team who only had who had a one or less. Over the past two seasons, the ACC has gone seven and 17. Essentially almost winning only one in every four games. Whereas the big 12 is slightly above 500. When you look at Bull Games and I realize for some people that's not going to be a big metric for others, it's going to be a huge metric because it's the postseason. The big 12 clearly has the advantage there over the ACC. The next category is TV ratings. And this one is also very, very interesting. So Colorado had 3.55 million people tune in for their average regular season game. Kansas State followed with 1.38. Utah 1.19, BYU 1.15. And Oklahoma State 1.09. Now the problem with TV ratings is preseason rankings and narratives matter a lot. And so it helps the team like Oklahoma State and Utah who are expected to be really, really good. And then weren't. And it hurts the team like BYU who is expected to do nothing. Now outside of just people, the common fan wanted to tune in. This also can be affected by what channels are being picked up. So BYU comes in the season, not expected to do much. They're going to have games on ESPN plus ESPN new CBS Sports Network. Whereas the team like Utah who's expected to win the conference is going to get their first couple games on ESPN, ABC, Fox, you know, those kind of channels. So when you're looking at that, it's not the most fair way to look at it, especially in the big 12 where there's so much parity. Arizona State had they had people known how good they were going to be. They would have also been well over 1 million viewers per game for the ACC. They only had three programs average more than a million views per game. Florida State at 2.2, Clemson at 2.08, and Miami at 1.35. Colorado from the big 12 had the most views. Is it Colorado or is it Deon Sanders? Doesn't matter. I think no matter what the team is or what the year is, you can look at a team and say, well, they only got views because of this. Well, it doesn't matter. They still got the views, right? You know, Miami got more views because they had camorad. Are you going to say that doesn't count because camorad is only a one-year transfer? No, of course not. He was part of the team. That's what people tune in to watch. Deon Sanders is the coach of Colorado. He was last year. He is this year. Will he be next year? I don't know. But because of that, they got the 3.55 million average viewers. That tops everybody. But then the next two go to the ACC in Florida State in Clemson. The next one goes to Kansas State from the big 12, and then it goes ACC, big 12, big 12, big 12. I think I've almost got to call us a tie, but if you force me to choose one, I would go big 12, very, very slightly. I think it's better to have the second and third most views than it is to have the first and fourth. In my opinion, so again, the ACC went two, three, and five. The big 12 went one, four, six, seven, eight. I don't know which ones really all that much better, but I will give these slight edge to the big 12 again, just because of having five teams over a million, as opposed to having only three. So what do you think? Do you think the ACC is better? Do you think the big 12 is better? I'm going to be a little bit biased with my answer, but I want to let you decide. You know, what's more important to you? Is it the big brands? Is it TV ratings? Is it being strong in the middle? Full game record? Getting national championships? Is getting a national championship for one team indicative of the entire conference? Clemson is the only one who's won a national championship in the recent, what, last 20 years? Is that enough to make the ACC better? I don't know. That is all up to you. Leave a comment. Let me know. What do you think? Which conference is actually better? The ACC or the big 12? I'd like to end the show by just once again inviting anybody who's interested in joining me for Know the Fo. Know the Fo is going to be a series that I'm going to be doing for the rest of the summer, where I'm going to cover all 16 teams. And I'm going to interview or talk with one superfan of each team within the conference. This is going to serve two purposes. First is going to raise awareness and get people excited for their own team. So today I'll feature Cincinnati. If you're Cincinnati fan, you love Cincinnati football. You know the dev chart. You know the schedule. You know the tendencies. Games are probably going to win. Games that might lose. And you want to talk about that for 30, 40 minutes. Let me know. Just send me a message on on on X on Twitter at first and 12. That is first and XII. And we'll make it happen. I want to talk with you, the fan, and get to know your team. This will also serve as sort of a scattering report for other teams, not other teams, but fans of other teams. To kind of know what they're, what to expect. You know what's going to happen when AirZona State goes and plays West Virginia. Well, the series is going to help AirZona fans get a little bit more familiar with West Virginia. And what their tendencies are, what players to watch, expectations, things like that. Again, thank you so much for tuning in today. My name is Adam Gibby. If you enjoyed the show, please like, subscribe, leave that five star review on Spotify on Apple Podcasts. It helps out tremendously. And I'll see you next time. Bye.[MUSIC]