As the NFL combine gets underway Wednesday in Indianapolis, one of the top storylines in the college football world is the shortage of Big 12 players in attendance. Just 19 players from the conference earned invites to this year’s combine, far fewer than the other Power 5 conferences: 66 from the SEC, 60 from the ACC, 51 from the Big Ten and 46 from the Pac-12.
As SI’s Andy Staples noted last week, this discrepancy is not resolved by factoring in the number of teams in each conference nor is it a one-year outlier. Since 2014, the Big 12 has sent the fewest players to the combine each year among the Power 5 conferences.