By: Justin “Couz” Walker | WV Sports Chat
ESPN’s Bill Connelly has released his annual College Football Playoff bracket predictions for the 2026 season. He has two Big 12 teams in the field, and WVU football has them both on their schedule for next season.
The first selection is no surprise. Connelly has the Texas Tech Red Raiders once again winning the Big 12 Conference and getting the league’s automatic bid. He has Texas Tech as the number three seed in next year’s CFP. The Mountaineers travel to Lubbock to take on the Red Raiders on Saturday, November 7.
The second Big 12 team Connelly predicted is more of a surprise. He has the Oklahoma State Cowboys as the number 11 seed and receiving one of the seven at-large bids in the CFP.
I think it’s fair to say that Indiana’s turnaround in year one of Curt Cignetti in 2024 may have sparked this reasoning. After all, there are a lot of similarities. Big 12 podcaster and writer John Kurtz laid those out in his latest Open for Business Newsletter.
The Mountaineers host Oklahoma State in Morgantown to open the Big 12 slate on Saturday, September 26. WVU football fans should not panic, however. Connelly also predicted North Carolina as his surprise team to make the College Football Playoff last season, and we saw how that turned out.
Here is what Connelly had to say about Oklahoma State, who will be under first year head coach, Eric Morris.
Hear me out! Were the Cowboys abjectly hopeless in 2025? Absolutely. They plummeted to 1-11 with what was, per SP+, their worst team since 1963 (and they had some awfully bad teams in the 1990s). But they made a potentially dynamite hire in Eric Morris — one of my favorite hires of the cycle — and he has basically imported his dynamite North Texas offense, bringing in 17 former Mean Green players including stars in QB Drew Mestemaker, RB Caleb Hawkins and WR Wyatt Young. OSU will score plenty of points in 2026, and if the Cowboys’ close-games luck flips as well, they could be a huge turnaround story.
So, while Connelly thinks that Morris was a great hire for the Cowboys, he also understands that making the CFP under a first year head coach is highly unlikely. He also understands that picking them to make that kind of turnaround would be a Hail Mary. Unfortunately, WVU football fans know all too well that sometimes, Hail Mary’s actually work; ahem, cough, cough…Houston!
Photo Credit: WVU Athletics
