Big 12 Tournament 2020: Schedule and Conference Bracket Predictions

The Big 12 is set to take over Kansas City again.

That's right: It's conference tournament time, meaning all 10 teams will battle it out for bragging rights—and, more importantly, a ticket to the NCAA tournament—next week inside Sprint Center.

Are the Kansas Jayhawks and Baylor Bears headed toward an epic championship collision? Or can a sleeper emerge and slay Goliath? We'll answer that question and more after laying out the tournament schedule.

Big 12 Tournament Schedule

1st Round: Wednesday, March 11

Game 1: No. 8 seed vs. No. 9 seed, 7 p.m. ET

Game 2: No. 7 seed vs. No. 10 seed, 9:30 p.m. ET

Quarterfinals: Thursday, March 12

Game 3: No. 4 seed vs. No. 5 seed, 12:30 p.m. ET

Game 4: No. 1 seed vs. Game 1 winner, 3 p.m. ET

Game 5: No. 2 seed vs. Game 2 winner, 7 p.m. ET

Game 6: No. 3 seed vs. No. 6 seed, 9:30 p.m. ET

Semifinals: Friday, March 13

Game 7: Game 3 winner vs. Game 4 winner, 7 p.m. ET

Game 8: Game 5 winner vs. Game 6 winner, 9:30 p.m. ET

Championship: Saturday, March 14

Semifinal winners, 6 p.m. ET

Predictions

Jayhawks Take the Title

Take care of Texas Tech on Saturday, and Kansas will have the Big 12's only one-loss conference record. Lose, and the worst that can happen is a tie with two-loss Baylor at the top.

In other words, the Jayhawks look like the strongest team in this field. They might have the best two players in this tournament between sophomore guard Devon Dotson and senior big man Udoka Azubuike. Plus, Sprint Center is located fewer than 50 miles from Kansas' home of Allen Fieldhouse, so the Jayhawks basically enjoy home-court advantage, too.

That doesn't make this an open-and-shut case, of course. The Jayhawks have won this tournament eight times in 16 seasons under coach Bill Self, but considering they basically bag a regular-season title every year, their dominance in this even isn't quite what it seems.

Anything can happen in a single-elimination tournament. One bad shooting night could spell disaster, and this year's Jayhawks are only a 34.8 percent three-point shooting team.

But if Kansas isn't the prediction, who would it be? The obvious answer is Baylor, the only team to take down the Jayhawks in conference play this season. But the Bears have their own shooting concerns (35.4 percent from three), and KenPom.com sees them as a slightly worse version of the Jayhawks: 16th on offense (Kansas is seventh) and fourth on defense (Kansas is second).

The boldest prognosticators might take a dart throw at one of the "others," but that's just taking a stab at an objectively worse team. That's not how we handle our predictions.

Dotson or Azubuike could dominate this tournament on their own, and good luck to the field if Ochai Agbaji, Isaiah Moss and Christian Braun are hitting their outside shots.

Maybe the biggest question, then, is whether anyone can truly make the Jayhawks sweat. The Bears have the personnel, but as our other prediction indicates, we don't see them getting the opportunity.

Texas Makes the Final Round

If you put your ear up to a basketball and listen closely, you just might hear the following warning. The Longhorns are coming! The Longhorns are coming!

Like an antique automobile that takes forever to fire up, Shaka Smart's squad needed months to get itself on track. Texas lost its first two conference games and couldn't get its conference record north of .500 until March.

But guess what—it's March right now. If you're reading between the lines, you might've recognized this must mean the Longhorns are on a heater.

They do, in fact, have five wins to show for their last five trips inside the line. The offense is coming to life. The defense is tightening the screws. And any hot-seat talk around Smart has either silenced or been reduced to some random whispers.

"We were roundly criticized early in the season for not being tough or not playing for the right things. Not having heart," Smart told reporters Tuesday after Texas' buzzer-beating win over Oklahoma. "And I think this is a great lesson for our guys. When they lose themselves in the fight and play for each other, then all of a sudden you become tougher. All of a sudden, your heart shows. It tends to work out better in the win-loss column."

If Texas handles Oklahoma State, this team will be storming into Kansas City burnt-orange-hot.

The Longhorns aren't great on offense (147th in adjusted efficiency, 34.1 three-point percentage), but they've been better during this stretch. Four different players have at least one 20-point outburst in this run—Andrew Jones, Matt Coleman III, Courtney Ramey and Will Baker—and collectively this club has gone 44-of-106 (41.5 percent) from distance.

If the offense is even a shade better than serviceable, then the defense (15th in adjusted efficiency) can take care of the rest.

If Texas shows out in Kansas City, this group can play its way into the Big Dance and give its head coach more job security than anyone would've imagined.