The Big 12 follows suit with mandatory availability reports in the 2025 season

The Big 12, as usual, is late to the party, but at least they arrived, right? As the last Power Four conference to do so, the Big 12 will now institute the mandatory release of availability reports for football, men's, and women's basketball.

Big 12 athletic directors voted on Wednesday to begin using the availability reports, but only for conference games. This will be the same as the Big Ten, SEC, and ACC, and will look very similar to the type of reports NFL teams provide for injuries.

The rules for releasing these reports will be that an initial report must be released three days before game day, and then one final report 90 minutes before the start of the game, which is similar to how the other conferences have formatted their reports.

Football players can have one of five designations: available, probable, questionable, doubtful, or out. For basketball players, they will have one of three designations: available, game-time decision, or out.

How will this new mandate affect Kansas State?

When it comes to the Wildcats, this shouldn't affect things greatly; it just means they will have to be more on top of releasing who has injuries during the week. This will of course give that information to opposing teams, but Kansas State will also get that in turn.

The one problem that could be seen with this is if Kansas State has a game on a Thursday or a Friday for football, like they do when they play Arizona on September 12, they will just have to release the report early. That means the report will have to come out on Tuesday rather than Wednesday. For a Thursday game, the report will have to come out on Monday, which is so early in the week, and injuries may not be fully determined by then.

All in all, this shouldn't affect the Wildcats too much and will help them game plan for injuries better going forward when it comes to opposing conference teams.