Big 12 Releases Women's Basketball Tournament Bracket

On Sunday, the women's basketball programs in the Big 12 wrapped up the regular season. After the final regular season game, the Big 12 released the 2026 women's conference tournament bracket. The first round of the women's tournament will tipoff on Wednesday, March 4th. The championship game will be played on Sunday, March 8th unless BYU advances to the championship game. In that scenario, the championship game would be played on Monday afternoon.

Below is the full Big 12 women's tournament bracket.

Just like that, the #Big12WBB regular season comes to a close... but the best is yet to come.

Ladies and gentlemen: the OFFICIAL 2026 Phillips 66 Big 12 Women's Basketball Tournament Bracket 👀 pic.twitter.com/VI7njw8a8L
— Big 12 Conference (@Big12Conference) March 1, 2026

The 9-seed Cougars will take on 16-seed Houston in the first round of the tournament. BYU and Houston will tipoff at 12:30 PM Mountain Time and the game will be broadcast on ESPN+. The winner of BYU-Houston will advance to the second round to take on 8-seed Utah. That game would also start at 12:30 PM Mountain Time and would be broadcast on ESPN+.

The Cougars, led by first-year head coach Lee Cummard, are looking to make the NCAA Tournament field for the first time since 2022. BYU is 20-10 and a much-improved team versus a year ago. Before the final week of the season, BYU was one of the First Four teams in the projected NCAA Tournament field according to Autumn Johnson of NCAA.com.

ESPN women's college basketball bracketologist Charlie Creme was not as high on BYU's chances to make the field. Creme listed the Cougars as one of the "Next Four Out", meaning BYU would be 5-7 teams short of making the tournament field. However, after those projections, BYU beat a Colorado team that was in the projected tournament field per Creme.

On the win, head coach Lee Cummard said, "Really hard-fought game. We got really smacked the last time we played this team, so we wanted to come out and show them a better product than they got the first time. Good moments from a lot of people on our team. We had a really good urgency and focus on us defensively in the fourth quarter from everybody that played in those 10 minutes. It Ultimately ended up being the difference in the game.”

The Cougars used an 18-0 run in the second half to beat the Buffaloes on Saturday.

On what propelled the run, Cummard said, “It was defense leading to offense. They were pretty connected defensively. A couple of players stepped up and really took on the task of trying to slow down number three.