Prime Time: Colorado Now Favored to Win Big 12, Eyes CFP Berth

In a development few experts saw coming before the college football season, Colorado is now the betting favorite to win the Big 12—and there are big off-field implications.

Winning a conference championship would give Deion Sanders & Co. a berth in the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff, and plenty of stakeholders would benefit from feeling the Coach Prime Effect in the postseason.

Here’s the road ahead: Colorado is No. 16 in the latest CFP rankings, two spots behind conference foe BYU at No. 14. If the programs each win their final two games, they’ll face off in the Big 12 Championship Game on Dec. 7 at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, with a trip to the CFP—and potentially a first-round bye—on the line. Colorado plays at Kansas on Saturday, while BYU is at No. 21 Arizona State.

Before the season began, Colorado had 30-to-1 odds of winning the Big 12, while BYU was dead last at 150-to-1. Now, Colorado is the favorite with odds ranging between -110 and -143, and BYU is second with odds between +310 and +340.

The Big Ticket

Disney could be the biggest winner of Colorado’s potential playoff run. 

ABC will broadcast the Big 12 title game, and ESPN has rights to the CFP (with two games this season being sublicensed to TNT Sports). While Colorado’s TV ratings have cooled off some this season, the Buffaloes did help ESPN draw its best Thursday season-opening number since 2017 as 4.8 million people tuned in to Colorado’s 31–26 victory over North Dakota State in Week 1.

Sanders has downplayed talk he might be interested in an NFL coaching job like the Cowboys, but AT&T Stadium could still pack in more than 80,000 fans for a Coach Prime–led Big 12 season finale, and the cheapest tickets already cost more than $100 each on secondary marketplaces. 

If Colorado is one of the top four ranked conference champions, it would go straight to a CFP quarterfinal matchup played at a New Year’s Six bowl game. If it is the fifth-highest-ranked conference champion, it would likely end up playing a first-round road game at a major school like Ohio State, depending on the final rankings.