Major jostling over the last week and yet the Big 12 standings have largely remained the same. Arizona was handed its second loss of the season by Texas Tech and Iowa State continues to look unbeatable at home after massive wins against Kansas and Houston, with the Coogs losing by three and confirming that they may be the best team in the country despite the loss. BYU is still looking for its first Quad 1A win on the season and UCF stops its three-game losing streak by taking down TCU at home.

But the big storylines after the last week of heavyweight fights are the implications of injuries to key players on teams destined for the NCAA tournament. Some are lost for the season, others with an undisclosed timeline of return and one player whose nagging injury issues have derailed the conversation on him and his team.

Darryn Peterson’s availability isn’t more noteworthy than his ability

It feels like year three of the “Darryn Peterson's health” discourse and he’s only been in a Jayhawks uniform for a little over three months. Somehow, someway, we’ve turned Peterson’s cautious removal from games or DNPs as a direct mimicry of the NBA’s ongoing crisis of teams resting stars in the regular season.

The low-hanging fruit of potentially the number one overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft deciding not to play instead of playing through injury or sickness has made its way through podcast banter to now public admonishment from Steph A Smith and whoever has to fire off a take during the dead period between the NBA All-Star Game, spring training and the NFL combine. Is Peterson sitting out to protect his draft stock? Does he even like basketball? No assumption can go unremarked when engaging with his lack of minutes this season.

This isn’t to say that you’re wrong if you’re disappointed that Peterson seems to have a higher bar for his body’s readiness than Alex Honnold does before a free solo climb. It’s disappointing for Kansas and college basketball fans not to see Peterson play, given his elite abilities. But it’s also worth remembering just how elite his skill set is as we process its absence.

At 35% usage and 62.9% true shooting in conference play, Peterson is the best offensive engine in a conference with teams that feature JT Toppin, AJ Dybanta and Kingston Flemings. He’s the lone power conference player averaging 20 points and playing under 30 minutes per game. Over players who’ve played 400 minutes or more this season, he has the highest points per 40 minutes average in the country at 29.8.

Peterson joins former Santa Clara Bronco and current Oklahoma City Thunder Jalen Williams as the only players to be in the top 90th percentile in better at points per possession on dribble drives, catch-and-shoot threes, off-the-dribble threes, midrange attempts and cuts. The difference is that Kansas has the eighth-highest strength of schedule so far this season, while Santa Clara’s ranked 99th.

The shooting guard scored 13 points before the first media timeout against Oklahoma State on Wednesday night, finishing with 23 points with a true shooting percentage of 83.6%. He only played 3 minutes in the second half.

Texas Tech’s outlook without Toppin

The Red Raiders had a roller coaster of a couple of games in the Grand Canyon state, beating Arizona at McKale and falling flat against a 12-loss Arizona State team and losing star JT Toppin for the final minutes of a two-possession game. It was then announced on Wednesday that the favorite to win Big 12 Player of the Year and First Team All-American honors tore his ACL and would be shut down for the season.

The loss is obviously massive for Grant McCasland’s team, but it’s also an unfortunate loss for college basketball as a whole. Toppin has been one of the best players in the country the entire season, providing a Herculean effort, averaging 21.8 points, 10.8 rebounds, 2.1 assists and 3.1 stocks in 34.8 minutes per game this season. He recorded the most 2nd chance points in the country at the time of his injury and the second-most offensive rebounds recorded among high rebound players.

In conference play, his dominance in the paint had him in a category of his own in paint points, rebounds and second chance points while third in points per game in league play.

Replacing this level of star is an impossible task for any team in the country, but this Red Raiders frontcourt simply does not have the horses to replace Toppin’s production in the aggregate. This Tech team was flailing the entire season, trying to outmaneuver the void left by Darrion Williams to NC State and the portal last offseason and they found no answers for a third option. How can they overcome needing to replace their leading scorer?

Just 14% of Christian Anderson’s minutes this season have come with Toppin off the floor. In those 242 possessions, Anderson’s turnover rate has ballooned from 15% on the season to 20%. His two-point field goal percentage drops from 54.1% to 46.7% with defenders honing in on the future NBA guard. Anderson will need to take another leap as a scorer for the Red Raiders to weather this injury and remain a top 4 to 5 seed in the NCAA tournament and McCasland will need to lean on his group of guards to make up the difference lost in the interior on offense.

BYU loses Saunders for the season

Last Saturday, BYU announced that Richie Saunders suffered an ACL injury that would end his season and likely collegiate career. While Dybantsa and Robert Wright garnered the lion’s share of attention as NBA-caliber talent, Saunders was the dependable offensive weapon, hitting big-time shots and consistently producing throughout the season, averaging 18 points and 5.8 rebounds.

Saunders led the Cougars in three-pointers this season and was the primary catch-and-shoot player on the team, with him having 28 more assisted-makes than any other player on the team. The loss lowers the ceiling on an already top-heavy team and makes things even harder on Dybantsa, who has only had 27% of his made field goals coming from an assist.

BYU’s point per possession drops from 1.25 with Saunders on the floor to 1.14 without him. Their offensive rebounding rate goes from 36.2% to 28.9% when he’s on the sideline. The Cougars were already a stumbling candidate for a protected seed before the injury was announced and a 5-6 record in Quad 1 games. Their five remaining games on the season include four Quad 1 games and a home game against a UCF team that will likely make the NCAA tournament.

Arizona without Peat for the near future

The lone non-long-term injury with significant implications is the sidelining of freshman Koa Peat, who suffered a lower leg muscle strain against Texas Tech and will likely miss at least 2 games before being re-evaluated. The 6-foot-8 forward already sat out Arizona’s 75-68 win over BYU and will be sorely missed when the Wildcats head to Houston on Saturday.

Losing Peat means the Wildcats are without the team’s most efficient and leading scorer on attempts at the rim. Peat was averaging 8.5 points in the paint and shot 70.7% at the rim. As fellow freshman Brayden Burries developed as perhaps the most undersung offensive weapon in the country alongside fellow first-team all-underrated point guard Jaden Bradley, Peat has become the third option in league play, albeit the primary frontcourt weapon.

Arizona’s oxymoronic depth within a short rotation was in large part because the front court platoon playing alongside Peat was allowed to fit around his production and usage. Peat leads the Wildcats in usage in an eight-man rotation; the group of other Arizona bigs is ranked fifth, sixth and seventh.

Freshman forward Ivan Kharchenkov stepped into a bigger role in the win over BYU on Wednesday, scoring 18 points on 12 attempts from the field. We’ll see if he can duplicate his second-highest point total on the season against a Houston team with the 15th-lowest 2-point field goal percentage allowed in the country.

Games to watch

  • Cincinnati at Kansas, Saturday at 1 pm ET, CBS
  • Arizona at Houston, Saturday at 3 pm ET, ABC
  • Iowa State at BYU, Saturday at 10:30 pm ET, ESPN
  • Houston at Kansas, Monday at 9 pm ET, ESPN
  • Texas Tech at Cincinnati, Tuesday at 7 pm ET, ESPN 2