NO TITLE GAME FOR BIG 12 WISE
Taking action after first playoff would have been rash
One week after Bob Bowlsby suggested his league had to do something about being left out of the College Football Playoff, the Big 12 decided to do nothing — and that’s the right thing to do.
Adding a conference championship game?
“I’m not sensing that’s where we’re headed,” Bowlsby said after meeting Tuesday with the league’s athletics directors.
The Big 12 will continue to push for deregulation of the NCAA rule governing conference championship games. “But you shouldn’t draw any conclusions from that,” Bowlsby said.
The best news is the league isn’t jumping to conclusions. It was a 180-degree turnaround from Bowlsby’s comments after a discussion last week with selection committee chairman Jeff Long. After months of preaching caution and saying he didn’t think the Big 12 needed to overreact, Bowlsby emerged from the College Football Playoff ’s spring meetings saying he thought the Big 12 was disadvantaged by not playing a conference championship game — a “13th data point,” using the new terminology we’re all learning as we go, for the committee to weigh. And he added, “I surmise we would probably move in that direction.”
Instead, after significant opposition from several athletics directors, the league will stay put and instead ponder the question posed Tuesday by TCU coach Gary Patterson:
“How do you know it’s not an anomaly, the way it turned out?”
No one knows, which is the point.
Baylor and TCU — tied with 11-1 records, they were designated the Big 12’s co-champions, despite the league’s “One True Champion” slogan — were jumped by Ohio State in the selection committee’s final rankings
Was it because the Bears and Frogs played only 12 games while the Buckeyes played a 13th? Or was it because Ohio State’s 13th opportunity turned into a 59-0 beatdown of Wisconsin behind a third-string quarterback? Who knows? Regardless, there wasn’t much appetite for radical change.
“I don’t believe it would be wise,” said Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt, who is a newly minted member of the selection committee.
The existing NCAA rule, which requires leagues to have at least 12 members and two divisions, must be altered before any change could occur anyway.
But it’s just as likely that a Big 12 team will work its way into the playoff bracket next fall without a conference championship game. Who knows?
“One year doesn’t make a trend,” Bowlsby said. “Let’s see how this goes forward.”
But even if it gets left out again, the Big 12 doesn’t seem likely to add a conference championship game.
“I just think our league is pretty good,” Baylor coach Art Briles said.
And adding a conference championship game just doesn’t make sense. At least not as long as the league has only 10 members.
On that note, Bowlsby reiterated that the league had no interest in expansion, and certainly not simply in order to stage a championship game.
The financial numbers in adding two new schools — or four, if you wanted to keep going — just don’t work out, regardless of the combination.
But the biggest reason the Big 12 is getting it right by doing nothing is that the bigger math problem has not changed, and it isn’t going to anytime soon. It has nothing to do with 13 games, or 10 teams, or nine conference games.
Five power conference champions will not fit into a four-team playoff bracket.
Everyone understood somebody was getting left out (and in some years, two might). But perhaps it didn’t hit home until it happened.
But what still has the Big 12 concerned is that its nine-game conference schedule, a full round-robin that no other Power Five conference can claim, wasn’t enough to put either Baylor or TCU over the top.
Bowlsby said athletics directors briefly discussed dialing back to an eight-game schedule but no one liked the idea.
Even if an anomaly becomes a trend, there are other fixes the Big 12 should consider before adding a conference championship game. It could mandate at least one Power Five non-conference opponent (as the Southeastern Conference has done). And if it’s really serious, it could prohibit scheduling Football Championship Subdivision opponents. Bowlsby said non-conference scheduling was a discussion item on today’s agenda, but don’t expect any actual rules to emerge. At least in the short term, neither of those things is likely to happen.
Several Big 12 athletics directors made the point that they’re already playing nine conference games (one more than the SEC and Atlantic Coast Conference do). And don’t forget that full round robin. They’ll always insist there’s no better way to determine a conference’s best team.
They’re right, which is why they’re right not to change it.