How far down it has gone
Each tie is counted once here, by the deepest step it needed — not by every step it touched. 40 tie groups, 2011–2025.
| Step that finished it | Ties | |
|---|---|---|
| (a) | head-to-head / mini round-robin | 28 |
| (b) | common opponents | 5 |
| (c) | the standings walk | 4 |
| (d) | strength of schedule | 1 |
| (e) | total wins | 2 |
| (f) | SportSource rating | 0 |
| (g) | coin toss | 0 |
The archive's other table counts a step whenever it seeded anyone, so a single tie can appear in several of its rows and the column sums past the number of ties. This one sums to 40, because a tie has exactly one deepest step.
The deepest walks
| Season | Tie | Size | Deepest step reached |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Cincinnati, Iowa State, Kansas State, TCU | 4-way | (e) total wins |
| 2019 | Iowa State, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Texas | 4-way | (e) total wins |
| 2024 | Arizona State, BYU, Colorado, Iowa State | 4-way | (d) strength of schedule |
| 2022 | Kansas, Oklahoma, West Virginia | 3-way | (c) the standings walk |
| 2013 | Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas | 3-way | (c) the standings walk |
| 2013 | Iowa State, TCU, West Virginia | 3-way | (c) the standings walk |
| 2012 | Baylor, TCU, Texas Tech, West Virginia | 4-way | (c) the standings walk |
| 2025 | Baylor, Kansas | 2-way | (b) common opponents |
| 2024 | Arizona, UCF, Utah | 3-way | (b) common opponents |
| 2023 | Iowa State, Kansas State, West Virginia | 3-way | (b) common opponents |
| 2023 | TCU, UCF | 2-way | (b) common opponents |
| 2023 | BYU, Baylor, Houston | 3-way | (b) common opponents |
Step six, and why it matters that it has never fired
The published procedure has seven steps. The first five are arithmetic you can check: head-to-head, common opponents, the standings walk, strength of schedule, total wins. Anyone with the results can verify them, which is what this site does.
Step six is not. It is a SportSource Analytics team rating — a commercial product. The conference buys it. It is not published, it cannot be recomputed from public results, and there is no version of it a reader can audit. If a Big 12 championship-game berth ever turns on step six, the answer to "why this team?" is a number nobody outside the transaction can see.
Step seven is a coin toss, which is at least honest about being arbitrary.
In 40 tie groups across fifteen seasons, step six has never been reached. The deepest any tie has gone is (e) total wins , which has settled 2 of them — one rung above the part you cannot inspect. That is the whole margin: the procedure has stayed auditable so far by luck of the results, not by design.