Where does each team in the Big 12 rank among rivalries for the Oklahoma State Cowboys in not just football but all sports?
The Oklahoma State Cowboys have put together a solid 2016-17 athletic campaign between football and basketball so far. They finished the football season 10-3 (7-2 Big 12) and just won their 20th game of the season in basketball. Even the baseball team looks to have a strong follow up season after they reached the College World Series in 2016.
OK State has become one of the strongest athletic programs in the Big 12 recently and thus more intense conference battles began to take shape. There are ten teams altogether in the conference and in this article we look at the biggest rivals of the Cowboys ranked one through nine.
A lot of this article should be considered subjective as there is no actual metric for measuring how intense a rivalry is overall. Yet, there are a few things I took into consideration when ranking the rivals out.
The intensity of recent matchups, geographic location, competitiveness across the major sports, and hatred between the two fan bases, were just a few things taken into consideration when making the list.
The individual sports that were taken into consideration the most were football and basketball. However, other sports like baseball and wrestling, also extremely important in Stillwater, were looked at as well.
It seems like getting to play the entire conference each season in football makes it harder to separate out who is actually more hated on a consistent basis in the Big 12. Schools that were former Big 12 foes like the Missouri Tigers, Nebraska Cornhuskers, Colorado Buffaloes, and Texas A&M Aggies, all left the conference by the time the 2012 football season rolled around.
Now, let’s take a look at the ranking of the biggest rivals in the Big 12 for the Oklahoma State Cowboys.