Big 12 Power Poll: Baylor Back In Top 3 as Utah Takes the Crown for Week 3
Welcome to the 2025 post-week 2 edition of the SicEm365 Premium “Big 12 Power Poll”. Over the last few days, the awesome members of our Premium Forums had access to a simple form to rank the football teams of the Big 12, however they saw fit, heading into week 3 of the 2025 season.
Here are the results:
The Baylor Bears bounced back from both their loss to Auburn in the season-opener and their subsequent drop to No. 6 in the power poll. The 48-45 double overtime win over No. 17 SMU saw Baylor rise to No. 3 in our poll, back above in-state rivals TCU and Texas Tech. Neither of those teams has played an opponent close to the level of Baylor’s foes this season so this jump makes sense.
Arizona State was the biggest dropper in the rankings this week after falling 24-20 at Blake Shapen-led Mississippi State. With Baylor getting plenty of flak for hurting the national perception of the Big 12 after losing to Auburn, the Sun Devils were in store for this drop and their own dosage of humble pie. ASU was a preseason favorite to win the Big 12, and the Bulldogs were picked to finish last in the SEC by the conference’s preseason media poll.
Elsewhere, Utah moved up to No. 1 in the poll based largely off of impressive performances against mediocre opponents. Kyle Whittingham will almost always have a good defense, and Utah appears to have made the right move by bringing in Jason Beck (OC) and Devon Dampier (QB) from New Mexico.
Other multi-spot movement includes Colorado jumping from No. 11 to No. 9, UCF rising from No. 16 to No. 14, and West Virginia falling from No. 13 to No. 15.
Now, if you’re someone who likes to dabble in simple statistics, I also pulled the min, max and mode for each team. That is the top rank, bottom rank and most common ranking. I did not remove the top 5% and bottom 5% of placements for best, worst and most common here (but I did for the average rank, so sorry for any confusion).
So this week, Baylor earned back a handful of first-place votes while Utah and Iowa State split the majority. Interestingly, ISU earned four more first-place votes but was pulled below Utah in the rankings due to their low rankings being worse and or more common than the Utes’.
And as always, the best and worst ranks — especially the disparity between them — is a fun thing to look at in this conference in particular. Every team in the bottom half of this poll is considered by someone to be a bottom-three team in the Big 12. Also, seven teams are considered to be top two by someone!
If you want even more numbers, I’ve got them. How about the differences between the post-week 1 rankings and the post-week 2 rankings?
With all of those numbers and charts and graphs provided to you, where do you draw the lines for tiers in the Big 12? Which teams are the premium members underestimating or overestimating currently?
One last question: how did the staff of SicEm365.com do with their rankings this week? Below is the full breakdown of our individual responses to the poll.
Let us know what you think in the comments, and for you premium members, look out for the next Big 12 Power Poll on Sunday, September 14th! Once conference play starts, charts tracking the changes in team rankings will be added as well!
