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
- Head-to-head.
- 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.
- Road record in conference games.
- Road record against the highest-placed team, then down the standings.
- A draw, held in public.
Three or more tied
- 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.
- Record against the highest-placed team and down, dropping the teams that fall behind.
- Conference road record.
- Conference road record against the highest-placed team and down.
- 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 Championship Seeding and Tiebreaker Procedures for women's basketball. The page is older than the men's (it says it was last updated for 2015-16 and still describes ten teams), but its tiebreaker steps are the men's, and run on the 2024-25 and 2025-26 results they give every seed the conference used, as the check below shows.
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
| Season | Seeds matched | |
|---|---|---|
| 2024–25 | 16 of 16 | 6 of the sixteen were in ties |
| 2025–26 | 16 of 16 | 10 of the sixteen were in ties |
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.