Welcome to the 2025 post-week 5 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 6 of the 2025 season.
Here are the results:
The biggest movers this week were Cincinnati — moving up three spots after their 37-34 win over Kansas — and Arizona moving down three spots after No. 14 Iowa State handled them easily 39-14. Kansas State is on the slow trudge back up the mountain after a 14-point win over UCF, and TCU fell a pair of spots like Baylor did after their own 27-24 loss to Arizona State.
The Baylor Bears stayed steady in 7th after a lackluster but still sufficient showing at Oklahoma State.
Overall, it seems that the worst two teams in the conference are pretty well known at this point (Oklahoma State and West Virginia) and there is consensus around the top three teams as well (Texas Tech, Iowa State, Arizona State). Of course, a Houston upset of Texas Tech or Colorado upending TCU could really shake things up next week!
One thing to note is that, so far this season, only two teams have crossed the imaginary line between No. 7 and No. 8 in the power poll. BYU has jumped above the line and Kansas State fell below it. Over seven editions of the poll, I think that is an interesting outcome worth calling attention to.
Also, if you’re someone who likes to dabble in simple statistics, I 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).
This week we bounced back in total response — 30 voters last week to 39 this week — so keep that in mind as you peruse the data.
For first-place votes, Texas Tech stayed at 21 while Iowa State earned back many of the votes they lost last week when they beat Arkansas State by just eight points.
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. There are pretty negative opinions about almost every team after five games. In fact, five of the teams in the conference were tabbed as either the worst or the second-worst team in the Big 12. That number was eight last week, but opinions lightened on Baylor, Kansas and Kansas State. There was no prompt for how to rank teams, mind you, so this does not necessarily mean that someone truly thinks Baylor will turn out to be the 12th worst team in the conference; that is just where their “power level” is at this point.
If you want even more numbers, I’ve got them. How about the differences between the post-week 4 rankings and the post-week 5 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, October 5th!
