Big 12 staying with 10 teams

Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said he believes the conference has to be constantly improving after getting left out of the first College Football Playoff. That doesn’t necessarily mean making the 10-team league bigger through expansion. “We have to recruit better. We have to develop better. We have to play better,” Bowlsby said Monday in his annual address to open football media days. “We have to win the big games when we have a chance to win the big games.” But Bowlsby doesn’t see the league at any real disadvantage with only 10 teams, despite Oklahoma President David Boren suggesting in the last month that the Big 12 is “psychologically disadvantaged” as the smallest of the five power conferences and should strive to again have 12 teams. It would be the presidents and chancellors — not Bowlsby or the athletic directors — who would make any ultimate decisions on possible expansion. The Big 12, going into its fifth season since reducing from 12 to 10 teams, is the only one of the five power conferences with a full round-robin schedule and no championship game. Also, a new tiebreaker procedure has been put in place after Baylor and TCU were declared co-champions last season — and both one-loss teams got left out of the playoffs. “We’ve put in place a tiebreaker that will ensure that not only do all of our schools play each other, but the title isn’t going to be decided by who you didn’t play,” Bowlsby said.