With less than a month left in the college football season, the race for the Big 12 is down to three teams. It’s not at all clear who’s going to win it.
2016 Big 12 standings: Oklahoma leads a 3-team race that could get complicated
Both Oklahoma State and West Virginia will have chances to take down OU, but there’s more to it than that.
Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports
Seven of the league’s 10 teams have three losses or more in conference play, and they’re out. The teams remaining with a chance to win the conference, including their Playoff rankings and conference records, are the following:
No. 9 Oklahoma (7-0)
No. 11 Oklahoma State (6-1)
No. 14 West Virginia (5-1)
The Big 12
Oklahoma plays West Virginia on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ABC), and that’ll have a lot to do with how this works out. But it’s not nearly as simple as winner-takes-all.
The Sooners have a simple path, of course.
If OU wins out, that’ll mean a 9-0 league record and an outright championship for the second year in a row. The Sooners have two non-conference losses and might not make the Playoff anyway, but they can win the Big 12.
OU’s final two games: the WVU meeting, then a return home to play Oklahoma State in Bedlam.
OU can also clinch this weekend by beating WVU and having OSU lose to TCU this week.
Oklahoma State’s path is simple, too. Maybe.
If OSU beats TCU on the road this week and OU on the road to close the season, the Cowboys will finish 8-1 and at least tied for first place. That probably puts the Pokes in the clear, but there’s some Big 12 tiebreaker weirdness to get into. (More on that later.)
West Virginia could still pull off a trick.
The Mountaineers have one more game remaining than the other two, and they could wind up taking an outright title. But a few things have to go right.
It’s unlikely but not impossible: WVU wins out, while Oklahoma State loses to TCU but beats Oklahoma. That’d leave the Sooners and Cowboys with two conference losses apiece, and West Virginia could win the Big 12 with just one.
Or the Mountaineers could get that help, but lose to either Iowa State or Baylor. That’s another chaos scenario here, which ends with three 7-2 teams.
If there’s a three-way tie, things get a bit weird, maybe.
Here are the Big 12’s multi-step tiebreakers in such a scenario:
1. The conference records of the three or more teams will be compared against each other.
2. The conference records of the three or more teams will be compared against the next highest placed team(s) in the conference (4, 5 and 6….).
a. When comparing against the next highest placed teams, a two-way tie among the next highest placed teams will be broken by head-to-head before the comparison begins.
b. If more than a two-way tie exists among the next highest placed teams, record against the collective tied teams as a group will be used.
3. Scoring differential among the tied teams. The team with the lowest difference between points scored and points allowed in games vs. the tied teams are eliminated from consideration.
The Big 12 writes out these tiebreakers in an exceptionally confusing way, and we haven’t yet had a reason to see what the conference really means, because they only went into effect last year, when OU won outright.
The first tiebreaker is the teams’ “conference records” “compared against each other,” which seems a weird place to just write that the team with the most wins, wins.
If the Big 12 means “compared in games against one another” – which is what most conferences do, and what makes sense – a three-way tie would go to Oklahoma State.
Because of the teams’ schedule setups, any three-way tie has to be at 7-2, and it has to include Oklahoma State beating both OU and WVU head-to-head.
So if that’s what the Big 12 means (I’ll seek clarification), good for the Cowboys. If it’s not, we’ll have our chaos.
See More:
