Welcome back to Sports Illustrated’s weekly college hoops mailbag with Kevin Sweeney. Here, Kevin will field questions submitted via Twitter and email about a variety of topics in the sport. Have a question you’d like answered in a future mailbag? Send it to @CBB_Central on Twitter or [email protected] (questions around either men’s or women’s basketball are welcome!). Without further ado, let’s get to your questions, which have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity ...
Matt asks: Besides Texas not being good, what has been your biggest surprise in the Big 12? How many bids can they get to with teams like TCU/OU on the bubble?
Iowa State’s surprising season has been well documented, but I think a tangential point off of ISU’s highly impressive start is that the Big 12 doesn’t have a bad team. In the preseason, I expected a clear bottom three of TCU, Kansas State and Iowa State in some order. I was higher on TCU than most, but still thought it was, at best, an NIT team. Instead, all three of those teams have been competitive, making the gantlet of Big 12 play even harder than normal.
