Can The Most Penalized Big 12 Teams Make The Playoff?

A third of the way through the 2024 college football season, we’re beginning to grasp which teams have a legitimate shot at reaching the 12-team College Football Playoff and which ones are falling by the wayside across Arizona sports betting.

In the expanded 16-team Big 12, surprise squads like Kenny Dillingham’s ASU Sun Devils bunch are 3-0, while preseason darlings like the Arizona Wildcats and Kansas Jayhawks have sputtered to 2-1 and 1-2 starts, respectively.

Entering Week 4 of the CFB season, oddsmakers from Bet365 Arizona have Utah (+250), Kansas State (+350) and Oklahoma State (+550) as the preemptive favorites to win the Big 12 in 2024, while UCF (+750) and Iowa State (+850) are the next closest.

While inevitable, penalties in college football can greatly impact the end result of each game. At BetArizona.com, we wanted to know how penalties impact a team’s chances of making the CFP.

Using Sports-Reference.com, we found how many penalties each current Big 12 team received over the past three seasons and that team’s final record. We then took the top five most penalized teams each season, found the average penalty count, average record and how often one of those teams made it into the CFP. The current penalty count for 2024 teams is as of Sept. 18.

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How Do Most Penalized Teams Do?

Average Winning Percentage

Average Penalty Count

Made Playoffs

.560

166

6.7%

Over the last three seasons, the CFB teams that commit the most on-field sins have gone on to average a .560 winning percentage at season’s end, with 6.7% of those teams going on to reach the four-team CFP.

On average, the teams that committed the most penalties finished with a flag count of 166 infractions per season, illustrating how costly bad discipline can be on the gridirons of the FBS each fall.

2024 Most Penalized Big 12 Teams

Rank	Team	# of Penalties
1	Colorado	51
2	Arizona State	49
3	Arizona	46
4	Texas Tech	43
5	Utah Utes	42

So far this season, two of the top five most penalized teams in the Big 12 hail from the Grand Canyon State, with the Sun Devils ranking second overall with 49 infractions, just ahead of the Wildcats, who are third with 46 this season. Bookmark our Arizona Playoff Chances page while you're here.

The penalty kings of the 2024 CFB season are the Colorado Buffaloes, however, as Coach Prime’s bunch have bumbled their way through a 2-1 stretch to open the season, despite committing 51 penalties to date.

Other Big 12 teams that spend the most time committing penalties this fall are Texas Tech, with 43, and the Utes, who have committed 42 infractions this season. Arizona State plays the Red Raiders in the Sun Devils’ Big 12 debut on Saturday in Lubbock, with ASU currently listed as a three-point road underdog on BetMGM Arizona.

USA Today photo by Evert Nelson.

Author

Christopher Boan

@cgboan

Christopher Boan is the lead writer at BetArizona.com after covering sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.