Big 12 Men’s Basketball 2026–272025–262024–25

How the Big 12 seeds its tournament

All sixteen teams play in the conference tournament in Kansas City, and every seed matters: 1 to 4 skip two rounds, 5 to 8 skip one. So the Big 12 breaks every tie in the standings, in this order.

Two teams tied

1. Head-to-head.
2. Record against the team in the highest position in the standings, then the next, and so on down, until one of the two does better.
3. Road record in conference games.
4. Road record against the highest-placed team, then down the standings.
5. A draw, held in public.

Three or more tied

1. A mini round-robin: each team's record against the others in the tie. Teams still level after it go through it again among themselves, and two left go to the two-team steps.
2. Record against the highest-placed team and down, dropping the teams that fall behind.
3. Conference road record.
4. Conference road record against the highest-placed team and down.
5. A draw.

Whenever a step is comparing against another tied group further down the standings, that group counts as one opponent: a team's record against all of them together. The one exception is a two-team group that head-to-head has already split, which counts seed by seed.

The regular-season title is never tiebroken. Teams level at the top are co-champions.

Source: the Big 12's Tournament Seeding and Tiebreaker Procedures, as of the 2023-24 season, the most recent version the conference has published.

Three things the document leaves open

• A team that has not played the opponent being compared against. The procedure says 2–0 is no better than 1–0 or 0–0. This site reads that as: a comparison counts only when every team in it has played that opponent, and otherwise that step is skipped. Over a full season every pair has met, so it matters only while the season is under way.
• The tied teams' own group. When walking down the standings, the group the tie came from is skipped; a team is not compared against itself.
• After one team comes out of a three-way tie. It takes the top seed of the group, and the others start the procedure again among themselves, from the mini round-robin.

Checked against the record

The site's engine run on each finished season's results, against the seeds the conference actually used. The same engine runs on this season's results as they come in.