Big 12 squads begin title crusades this week

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- This is the time of year when the Big 12 coaches start saying nice things about each other, predicting a tough road to the conference championship and expressing guarded optimism for their own teams' prospects.

Let the games that matter begin.

Every Big 12 team but one will take a winning record into conference play, which starts this week for everyone but Kansas State and No. 7 Oklahoma.

"I haven't seen any of them play," said Texas Tech coach Bob Knight, whose Red Raiders are 12-2 going into Saturday's conference opener against Oklahoma State (9-1). "But I think the teams are going to be very good, just like the other two years I've been here."

There's one obvious exception: Baylor, which at 5-7 is the only Big 12 team under .500. First-year coach Scott Drew, who inherited a program in disarray and under NCAA investigation when Dave Bliss quit in August, doesn't expect things to improve dramatically.

The Bears, who will not play in the Big 12 tournament as part of self-imposed sanctions, are down to five scholarship players after senior starters Terrance Thomas -- the team's leading scorer and rebounder -- and R.T. Guinn were ruled academically ineligible last week.

"Most of our games been respectable," Drew said Monday during the Big 12 coaches' weekly teleconference. "We haven't been blown out of any games yet, but that could happen, we know."

Oklahoma, meanwhile, hasn't lost yet. But even at 10-0, coach Kelvin Sampson said, it's hard to get a handle on his team. Saturday's game at No. 1 Connecticut could provide some indication.

"We've played good enough to win, but I don't know that we've played great enough to prove ourselves a top 10 team yet," said Sampson, whose Sooners don't open Big 12 play until taking on Oklahoma State Jan. 14 in the first game of the Bedlam Series. "The word that best describes us is 'intriguing."'

Kansas State (7-3) also has to wait until next week to open its conference season. Of the second-tier teams looking to break into the top six, the Wildcats seem most in need of some momentum.

They won seven of their first eight games but have lost twice on the road since then, including a humiliating 93-52 blowout at Missouri-Kansas City on Dec. 30. They're 1-22 in their last 23 road games.

Kansas State closes out its nonconference season against Savannah State on Saturday, then opens Big 12 play Jan. 14 at No. 13 Kansas (8-2). The Jayhawks own a 26-game winning streak in the series and haven't lost to the Wildcats since January 1994.

"I think this week of practice and playing as well as we can Saturday are going to be critically important to how we start off league play," coach Jim Wooldridge said. "We have to do well."

Missouri (5-4) could use some early Big 12 success, too, to offset its up-and-down results against nonconference opponents.

The Tigers, ranked as high as No. 5 early in the season, fell out of the rankings Monday after being ranked No. 23 last week. They closed out the week with a 20-point win over Iowa, but that was after an embarrassing 71-67 home loss to Belmont four days earlier.

"We've been inflated early in the year," said coach Quin Snyder, whose team opens its conference season Wednesday at Iowa State (7-2). "That makes the dip seem bigger than it is."

Colorado (6-3), which opened Big 12 play Monday night with a 77-62 loss to Kansas, could lose one of its top players early in the conference season if school officials can't work out a question about senior forward Michel Morandais' grades.

Morandais, who averaged 14.8 points going into the Kansas game, was ruled ineligible for the spring semester because he passed only one of two required classes this fall.