The 2025 college football season promises to be an exciting one within the Big 12. In a conference that is largely driven by parity, there are plenty of teams with championship expectations. Unsurprisingly, in a conference like that, there are also plenty of great coaches.
Ahead of the season, Sporting News ranked all the coaches in the country from best to worst. That included the 16 coaches roaming the sidelines in the Big 12. There’s some specific criteria that go into those rankings too. The coach’s overall record, record at the current school, and a three-year record to gauge that ranking. Other factors, like career accomplishments, are also taken into account.
Ultimately, this isn’t an exact science and comes down to Sporting News’ opinion. With that in mind, here’s how Sporting News ranked the Big 12 coaches.
Coming in as the top-ranked coach in the Big 12 is Kyle Whittingham. He’s led the Utah Utes since 2005 and has put together a record of 167-86 during that time. It’s a run that includes three conference championships, in the Pac-12 and Mountain West, and eight AP Top 25 finishes.
At the same time, in 2024, Whittingham and Utah would miss a bowl game for the first time since 2013, not counting the Covid-impacted season. That was also their first season in the Big 12 and came with rumors that Whittingham might retire soon. Still, he’s coaching and remains among the best in the entire country.
2025 will be Sonny Dykes’ fourth season as the head coach at TCU. He had hit the ground running when he first got there, going to the College Football Playoff and a national championship game appearance. They’d come up short there and haven’t been to those same heights since. Still, TCU is 27-13 under Dykes.
Prior to TCU, Dykes coached at SMU, Cal, and Louisiana Tech. He’d become known as an offensive minded coach who came off the Mike Leach tree. That’s included one conference championship, when he was in the WAC. There have also been nine seasons when he’s led his team to bowl game invitations.
Matt Campbell has been the head coach at Iowa State since 2016. Since then, he’s led the Cyclones to one of their best runs of success in program history. That includes going to seven bowl games, two AP Top 25 finishes, and two trips to the Big 12 Championship Game. For his entire time there, he’s gone 64-51.
Prior to Iowa State, Campbell found success in the MAC, leading Toledo. Now, Campbell finds himself in a unique position. The Cyclones are knocking on the door of a conference championship. If they get their first conference championship win since 1912, then they’ll also be looking at a College Football Playoff appearance.
Chris Klieman took over for Kansas State in 2019, replacing a legend in Bill Snyder. That’s never easy to do, but so far he’s proven himself more than capable. Under Klieman, Kansas State has gone 48-28. That includes a Big 12 Championship, five bowl appearances, and two AP Top 25 finishes.
Klieman came to Kansas State with plenty of head coaching experience. He had been the head coach at North Dakota State for five seasons prior to that. During that time, he won four national championships at the FCS level. The only season at that level he didn’t win it all, he made it to the semifinal.
Arizona State was the surprise of college football in 2024. The Sun Devils were projected to struggle in their transition into the Big 12. Instead, they messed around and won the conference, going to the College Football Playoff in the process.
Ultimately, Dillingham is a very young head coach. 2024 was just his second season as a head coach. So, in many ways, he was flashing potential that he and the Sun Devils hope he builds on. The 35-year-old now has a 14-12 all-time record. That comes after inheriting a massive rebuild in Tempe. If he does repeat, he could easily move up these rankings again.
Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy has had deep ties to the school since his own playing days, when he was a quarterback for the Cowboys. That was alongside Barry Sanders. By 1990, he began his coaching career as an assistant there, and except for from 1996-2000, he’s always been in Stillwater. In 2005, he became the team’s head coach and has since found plenty of success.
Gundy’s success includes a 169-88 record, a Big 12 conference title, and 10 AP Top 25 finishes. However, he’s coming off a difficult season. The Cowboys went just 3-9 last season and were winless in conference play. They’d go on to miss a bowl for the first time since 2005. With that, there are some raised eyebrows within the program.
BYU isn’t an easy place to succeed, let alone thrive in. The school is unique, due to its religious affiliations, beyond all others in the conference. That only makes the job that Kalani Sitake has done with BYU that much more impressive.
Sitake took over in 2016. Since then, he’s led the Cougars from the ranks of the Independents to the Big 12. He’s also put together a 72-43 record, three AP Top 25 finishes, and six bowl appearances. Last season, BYU was even on the verge of making the Big 12 Championship Game.
Kansas is, traditionally, seen as one of the hardest jobs in the entire Big 12. Despite a .470 winning percentage all-time, Lance Leipold has found some success with the program, particularly when quarterback Jalon Daniels has been healthy. Under Leipold, Kansas is 22-28, but has two bowl appearances and an AP Top 25 finish.
Kansas took a bit of a step in the wrong direction in 2024, missing a bowl. However, Leipold has still done plenty to earn respect nationally. That goes back to the success he’s had at Buffalo and at the Division III level with Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Perhaps no coach is better known in the country than Deion Sanders. A Hall of Fame player, Sanders coached at the high school level and Jackson State before landing the Colorado job. In two seasons there, Sanders has needed to deal with a pretty major rebuild, going 13-12 in the process.
In 2024, Colorado went 9-4. That was a strong season, which included producing Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter. Now, however, Sanders is being tasked with replacing Hunter, as well as starting quarterback Shedeur Sanders. Finding out how well he can do that is going to go a long way in telling how Sanders is judged nationally.
Within the state of Texas, Joey McGuire is known as a high school coach. He’d make the jump to coaching college in 2017 as an assistant. By 2022, he had a head coaching opportunity with Texas Tech. There, he’s gone 23-16 in three seasons, going to three bowl games.
Recruiting, both from high school and in the Transfer Portal, has been a strength for McGuire at Texas Tech. Now, he’s hoping to find a way to take another step forward with his talented roster. If he does that, then McGuire could have a team competing to win the Big 12.
Dave Aranda has had an interesting tenure at Baylor. Regarded as a great defensive mind in the game, Aranda has had an inconsistent time as a head coach at Baylor. Opening in the disjointed 2020 season, Aranda got to a slow start before winning the Big 12 and going to the Sugar Bowl in his second season. Since then, Aranda has flirted with the hot seat before seeming to turn it around in 2024.
In the end, Aranda is 31-30 at Baylor. He has one AP Top 25 finish, where the Bears ended up fifth in the country and won the Sugar Bowl. Baylor has also gone to three bowl games. So, in 2025, Aranda needs to find a way to solidify his place among the conference’s coaches.
Now at his sixth stop as a head coach, but his first Power Four job, Willie Fritz has earned a reputation for building programs. Now, he’s hoping to do that at Houston, even if it’s been a bit of a slow start with the Cougars. They went just 4-8 last season. That’s the same record Fritz had in his first season at Tulane.
Fritz is hoping to take strides forward at Houston next season. The Cougars need to improve on offense, though, after struggling last year. Much of that responsibility will then fall on the shoulders of incoming transfer quarterback Conner Weigman.
Rich Rodriguez is arguably the best coach in West Virginia history. Of course, that was 17 years ago and he’s made stops at Michigan, Arizona, and Jacksonville State since then as a head coach. Those have come with mixed results, but now he’s back for his second tenure with the program he thrived at.
In his first tenure at West Virginia, Rich Rodriguez had a 60-26 record over the course of seven seasons. He also had four AP Top 25 finishes and four Big East Championships to go along with six bowl appearances. That’s come in a career where he has a record of 190-129-2.
When the Cincinnati Bearcats made the move to the Big 12, they also were forced to make a coaching change. They’d land on Scott Satterfield, in a move that was a bit surprising at the time. He was coming from Louisville, another Power Four school, where he had been inconsistent. Now, he’s found those inconsistencies have followed him to nearby Cincinnati.
Satterfield has missed out on a bowl in each of his first two seasons at Cincinnati. He has an overall record of just 8-16. That was after he went 25-24 at Louisville and 51-24 before that at Appalachian State. So, he’ll need to quickly turn things around.
Scott Frost is back in college coaching in general and Orlando specifically. There, he spent his first two seasons as a head coach in 2016 and 2017, taking a team that was winless the season before he got there and making them an undefeated, AAC Champion, Peach Bowl Champion, and declared national champion. At the time, it made him one of the hottest commodities in coaching, and he returned to his alma mater Nebraska.
Frost’s Nebraska tenure never got off the ground. He failed to ever make a bowl and was fired with a record of 16-31. Now, after taking some time away, he’s hoping to reinvent himself with UCF. The two sides have thrived together before, and the hope is they can do so again.
It was a difficult first season for Brent Brennan at Arizona. The Wildcats transitioned to the Big 12 with some big expectations after taking strides under previous head coach Jedd Fisch. It was a difficult year, though, and Arizona massively underperformed. Arizona went 4-8 and there has already been some hot seat concern for Brennan.
Brennan previously was the head coach at San Jose State. He had a 34-48 record there in seven seasons, and won the Mountain West after undertaking a massive rebuild with that program. He succeeded there, but will need to get Arizona on track quickly.
