This is day five of evaluating the upper-end talent in major conferences. So far we've covered the ACC, the AAC, the Big East, and the Big Ten. Go to the first link (the ACC) to read up on methods and where the data comes from. There's also a graphic there that shows in very simple terms why landing top 100 recruits is probably more important than you think.
Now it's the Big 12, which stands out for a couple of reasons. First, Kansas has the most consensus top 100 recruits of any of the teams we've looked at so far. Second, the talent in the conference is (and has been) dominated by Kansas, which is much of the reason they've won nine Big 12 regular season titles in a row.
Regardless, here are how the top 100 recruits are spread out through the conference.
Kansas has 11 top 100 players on scholarship, which is just ridiculous. Last year Florida had the same amount. This year, the most we've seen is Duke and North Carolina who both have ten.
There's a big drop to the next tier of Baylor (6), Texas (5) and Oklahoma State (5). At the bottom end are Oklahoma with one, and Kansas State and Texas Tech who get shut out. It should also be noted that one of TCU's two have yet to qualify academically. This is important in light of a stat from last year. There were 18 high major programs who had zero or one consensus top 100 player on their roster, and of those 18 teams, only one had a winning conference record. Who was that team? Kansas State.
Drilling down to the 5*s and high 4*s (top 50 players), it looks like this.
Again, Kansas dominates. But here is where you can see some differences between KU and other top schools. Duke "only" has ten top 100 players, but nine of them are from the top 50. Kansas has six.
For the consensus 5*s, it looks like this.
Seven total players seems right in the wheelhouse of major conferences.The ACC has ten of these players, the Big Ten and AAC have six, while the Big East only has two.