Prime Time at Big 12 Media Days: Mike Gundy, Kyle Whittingham and Deion Sanders Take the Mic

The Big 12 took center stage in Las Vegas, and the stars delivered. In this episode, we recap all the major moments from 2025 Big 12 Media Days — including Deion Sanders' passionate comments on NIL and college football chaos, Kyle Whittingham’s calm confidence as Utah enters a new era, and Mike Gundy’s candid take on rebuilding in Stillwater. From quarterback competitions to realignment undertones, we break down the storylines that will shape the upcoming season. It’s the Big 12 like you’ve never seen it — bold, unfiltered, and ready to fight.

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Big 12 media days have come and gone. So what are the biggest takeaways we're gonna talk about that on today's episode? From all the homeless state to Colorado, Arizona State to Cincinnati. We've got Big 12 covered from end zone to buzzer-beater. This is verse 12. You're all at us past to all 16 teams. All in every episode.[Music] Hello, welcome to another episode of first and 12. I'm your host Adam Gibby. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are finished with Big 12 media days. They are done. They were completed and we don't really have much more until we get the first game of the season between Iowa State and Kansas State in week zero in Dublin, Ireland. Until then, it's going to be just a lot of rumors, speculation, previews, things like that. But we're not going to hear probably all that much coming out of the conference as at least in terms of newsworthy stories or in terms of press conferences or anything like that. So yesterday, I talked about the first day of Big 12 media days, which featured a lot of shots taken primarily towards the Big 10, but also college football in general. If you want to hear about that, essentially, I made the reference of it, felt like the Hunger Games in the second movie where all the tributes had to come back and they were just super angry about it. Kind of can compare that to how the Big 12 kind of feels right now. How, the Big 12 has been promised a year, a powerful conference. You're going to get all these rights, all these privileges, but it feels like a lot of those are being taken away by the SEC, by the Big 10, and by the media partners in general. So if you want to check that out, check out yesterday's episode. I also talked a little bit about remarks from Scott Frost, the head coach UCF, also some other coaches that spoke on the first day. Now yesterday, being the second and last day of Big 12 media days, it was naturally not going to get as much attention. I do think that there was some strategy in who they decided to let speak on yesterday. Some of the coaches that spoke were neon standards and my Gundy, two of the more prominent well-known coaches in the Big 12, but there weren't all the fireworks that we saw on the first day, and that was expected. It's the first day. The Big 12 was the first conference to have their media days. So again, it was expected and kind of well-known that day two was not going to bring the same fireworks as day one did. Now, I do want to go over some things that were talked about. In particular, neon standards. Now, and everybody knows that any time neon standards takes the mic, it's muslisten, TV or we must watch TV. And he said a couple things that are very, very interesting. First, he talked about his team and said that he does believe that they are improved from 2024. That's a very interesting statement because yet you remember he had two sons on that team, one of the which was the starting quarterback, Stuart Sanders. He also had Travis Hunter who was the two A player on as a receiver and quarterback who ended up winning the Heisman trophy. And so for him to say that Colorado was improved. Normally, you know, you would just take that and stride, yeah, every coach is going to say that, yeah, we're better from last year because that's what you say. But when deon Sanders says that you kind of wonder if he actually means it and actually has a strong belief in that, he does acknowledge that it's going to be hard to replace Travis Hunter. He said it might take three players on offense to replace his productivity and might take two to replace him on defense. Despite that, he feels like he has a better team. They did go back into the transfer portal. I don't know if it was just there wasn't the same news about it or if they didn't go in quite as much. But it didn't feel like they were as heavy in the transfer portal this year as they were last year when it felt like they did a complete overhaul of the entire team. Sanders also said that he thinks that the big 12 champion is going out to loss his sort of like last year. He said, quote, I'm going on the record. Whoever was big 12 is probably going to lose two games. It's just going to go down like that in the end like it was last season. This is a almost worst case scenario for the big 12. The narrative out there, at least the big 12 narrative is that the big 12 is the deepest conference in college football. And while that might be factually true in the sense of your worst team is better than anybody else's worst team and your bottom middle of the pack can beat anybody else in the conference. Unlike in the SEC, you're not seeing Mississippi State upset Alabama. You're not seeing Vanderbilt except for last year upset one of those top teams. Vanderbilt's not going to be Georgia kind of thing. But in the big 12, you could see a Cincinnati upset a Colorado. You could see Kansas BBYU kind of thing. And that's very dangerous for the conference because once we get to the end of the season, we want the big 12 to have one or two very obvious top teams last year. If you remember, there were four teams that tied for first place. Arizona State, Iowa State BYU in Colorado. They all finished with a seven into conference record. And there had to be tiebreakers, ultimately sending Iowa State and Arizona State to the conference championship game. The other thing that that did is it made the conference a one-bed league. You need to have a couple teams finish 11-1, or maybe you have a team finish 11-1, one finish 10-2, and then the 10-2 team wins the conference championship. Essentially, you need two teams getting into the college football playoff this year. That is something that Brett Yormark said he expects this year. It can be very disappointed if it's a one big lead again, one bid league again. Another thing that Dion Sanders said is that he wants a salary cap in college football. He said, "I wish there was a salary cap like the top of the line player makes this and if you're not that type of guy, you're not going to make that. That's what the NFL does." So the problem is you have a guy that's not that good, but he's going to go to another school and they give him half a million dollars. You can't compete with that, and it doesn't make sense. You understand, near why they're in the playoffs, speaking of certain teams that make the college role a playoff. It is kind of hard to compete with somebody who's giving 25 to 30 million to a freshman class. It's just crazy. This is an interesting topic. This did come up in a round table of coaches yesterday where a lot of coaches said, "Hey, we need salary caps, we need contracts," and then other coaches kind of fought back on that and said, "No, we need to amateurism. We still need to remember these are college kids. These are not professional athletes." It feels like there's a tug of war going on right now in the sport of college football, college sports in general, but really college football, where we're trying to decide what is college football. Is it a professional league or is amateurs, is it student athletes? Are we still saying student? These players that are signing these multi-year deals, how does academics plan to that? How does the transfer portal plan plan to that? There's a lot of different things that are filling like coaches and media and players are getting frustrated at and they feel like, "Okay, NIL is getting out of control. We got to bring that in." The transfer portal is getting out of control. We got to bring that in. Now, we have revenues sharing. Okay, how is that going to work? What is fair? What's not fair? There needs to be some kind of salary cap. I think within three years from now, we're going to have a lot of these questions answered. As we go into the next TV contracts in 2030, I think hope, at least, I hope that college football is ironed out a little bit that we've figured out, "Okay, this is how much you pay players. This is how much NIL can go up to realistically." I mean, I don't think NIL is going to go away and I don't think you can really put a cap on it, but I think you can look at professional athletes again. You look at, "Okay, Steph Curry did a gatorade commercial. How much did he get paid?""All right, well, we're not going to pay your left tackle three times as much to do a commercial for a local tire shop." You can kind of look at that and see different ranges. I think that'll be kind of brought in. I think the transfer portal is going to get fixed too. I think that when you sign contracts, I think they're going to put stipulations. I think they're going to put in fine print and even very not fine print, just very obvious. If you sign here and you leave, you lose all your money, you lose a big portion of your money. I think that could be something. I don't think we're going to get to the point of trades. I haven't really seen that thrown around at all or anything, but in any professional sports market or any professional sports league, you do get trades. You're not going to get that in college, but I do think there's going to be sort of these rules rained in a little bit, and I think that'll be good for the sport. Finally, there have been some speculation about Coach Prime's health. Just during a spring ball, some seemed to notice that he was struggling a little bit. He said he wasn't going to comment on that. He said, "I'm not going to talk about my health. I'm here to talk about the team. I'm not going to really go into that anymore just because there's nothing else to really go into with that." Another coach that spoke with Kyle Whittingham, he has publicly said that he's looking to retire. In fact, I believe was last year, he said that he may not be at media days in two years or next year at this point. He even admitted that this may be that had you thought had a good year last year that he would have perhaps left. He said it was too frustrating. It was too disappointing as much as college football has changed with all the factors that might pull you away. That was my overriding reason. That's not us. That's not who we are. It left a terrible taste in my mouth. I did not want the opportunity. I did not want to miss the opportunity to get that taste out. It sounds like Kyle Whittingham is on a year-to-year kind of contract right now where if he has a year where he's satisfied with how the team performs, if he has a year where he feels like he's done enough, then he's going to step away. That'll be interesting. They do have an heir apparent. They have a coach Morgan Scaley who's going to take over after Kyle Whittingham leaves. I haven't heard that that's changed. I don't have any reason to believe that. That will change. One does have to wonder a little bit though if Utah does struggle again this year if they do end up missing out on a bowl game again. Kyle Whittingham leaves is Utah going to be in a position where they're going to say yes, we're going to promote one of our system coaches to be the head coach or they're going to want to go in a new direction after two losing seasons. I don't think Utah is going to have a losing season this year but that is an interesting thing to think a little bit about. Rich Shraddry guess who is coaching at West Virginia. He coached a long time ago. I remember watching him coach games. I didn't realize it was 2001 in 2007. That makes me feel really, really old. I was thinking it was the early 2010s. No, it was 2001 in 2007. He's having a second stint here, Scott Frost at UCF. He said that he is super excited to bring back the Mountaineer offense. If you go back and watch those games, they were one of the few teams that ran a tempo offense. Now let's become a very commonplace where everything is run more through reading a defense. It's more run up tempo. It's the read option. I've heard some players say that when they run a play, they know the next play is going to be one of three things and it depends on how much they get on first down. So if they get six yards on first down, then they automatically know, okay, we're going to run a, b or c on second down. They look over to the sideline while they're running up to snap the ball. They get the signal and then they go from there. It's very different from the traditional style of having a receiver or running back. Well, now they have the helmet communication, but the huddle up, sharing the play with the entire team and then going out running the play. Rich Rodd was one of the very first to actually ever ran that kind of offense. And he's saying he's going to bring that back. So that could be really exciting. He does say that it's not going to stick out like it did when he was at West Virginia at the first time because again, it was a new idea. It was something that nobody was really running at the time. And so West Virginia football was, I don't want to go as far as they must watch TV, but it was definitely a entertaining style. Kind of like how I think of teams who run sort of the triple option. It's very unique. And when you watch it, it's, it's, it's just fun to watch because it's so different. Finally, the last coach I want to go into is, is Mike Gundy. Last year, Oklahoma State didn't win a single game in the big 12. They had arguably their worst season in this century. And Mike Gundy, who has built up a pedigree, has built up enough trust with the administration with the school, with the fans to where he wasn't fired. Kind of similar to Kyle Woodingham. You have to wonder if the same thing happened at Cincinnati, same thing happens at Houston or if it happened at really any other school in the big 12, would that coach have survived as as that had coach? And Mike Gundy did. I'm going to read some of his quotes because I thought it was interesting. He said, the off season for us has been crazy. Whenever I used to go on vacation in July, I'd have a really good idea who our two deep was. And in most cases, who's starting quarterback was going to be, I'm going to try to go on vacation a week or so. And I'm not sure that I know who will be the starters in eight of the 12, 22 spots, not counting special teams. Coach is understanding that it's going to have to happen faster in August than it ever has before. So we can get established and get some identity, hopefully develop some team chemistry, get ready to play in the first game. So my gun is basically saying, we don't really know exactly who's going to be starting. We don't know who the backup star. We don't know who our starting quarterback is. And we're not going to really worry about it until we get together as a team. But once we do, we're going to have to do an install much quicker. He also did say that they brought in 16 transfers and that he brought them into start. He said he would not have brought players in if they were not there to start. So he has essentially 16 starters. I take that a little bit as coach talk. I don't believe all 16 of them are going to be starters. I think that you're going to get some that are in the two deep. And then obviously as a team as the team, then obviously as the season starts in the season and the games get going, things are going to adjust injuries happen. And we'll see what happens with that. So that was really about it. There wasn't a ton that was talked about. There wasn't a ton that was really newsworthy on the second day of big 12 media days. So now we flip the calendar. We look towards the season. We look towards fall camp, fall camp. It's going to kick off here in about three weeks for most teams. And we've got a couple teams that are going to have interesting quarterback battles. We got Colorado, Oklahoma State, BYU. Those are just a couple of teams that don't have starting quarterback yet. You look at other teams that are going to bring in a new quarterback or a new system. You have some teams bringing in a new coach. I mean, you look at West Virginia, you look at UCF. So there's just a lot of moving pieces. And it'll be very interesting to see sort of how things end up playing out once the season does get going. One thing that I did want to mention is that again, the big 12 didn't have a preseason pulled out of something that some of the coaches commented on today. It seems pretty unanimous. They all kind of agreed with the idea. I don't know it goes on. I'm sure there are emails and I'm sure there are communications that go out from the conference to their coaches that say, Hey, we need to present a front of unity on this. I think that could have been one of the things I think another one could have been the five plus 11 model. I didn't really see any pushback from any of the coaches and any of the players against that model, which I think is a little bit interesting just because there are a lot of opinions out there. There are a lot of different interests out there. And it is something that I did think there might be some opposition within the big 12 in different opinions. Some saying, Hey, let's take the two guaranteed spots and others saying, earn it on the field. Everybody seemed to be on the earn it on the field. Finally, if you love college football, which if you're listening today on July 10th, you obviously do because most people aren't tuning into college football stuff on July 10th. Head over to my Twitter page, my xpage, first and 12. I've got a poll going on right now. It is the best big 12 fan base. Now, we're down to the championship and whether or not your team made it or not, go in and vote. Which one do you like more? It is the four seed BYU and it is the three seed Texas tech. Right now, BYU is running away with it. Absolutely running away with it. They're known for doing really good on Twitter, Pulse, by the way, but can Texas tech make a comeback? It is going until tomorrow. So you've got little lesson, well, to pay money, you have less than a day to get your vote in, share it, retweet it. I would love for this to go big. I would love to get hundreds of votes and just have it be a fun little representation of where big 12 fans are in regards to the conference. So if you can do that, that'd be great. Also, if you like the show, please like, subscribe, leave that five star review. It helps us reach more people, helps us grow this community. Thank you so much for joining us today. Have a great day. See you tomorrow. Bye.(upbeat music)(upbeat music)