If it feels like this year’s Oklahoma-Oklahoma State football game is happening way too early, it is. Bedlam is usually a Rivalry Weekend match right after Thanksgiving, and it hasn’t happened earlier than Nov. 24 since 2004.
Oklahoma-OSU happens earlier in the year now, so the Big 12 doesn’t get embarrassed
A new conference championship game could’ve made a Bedlam regular season finale awkward.
Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images
There’s nothing that requires the game to be played then. The Sooners and Cowboys have played in October 18 times in their long history. But for the last decade and change, Bedlam has been a staple of high-stakes finishes to regular seasons.
This year’s game is in Stillwater on Nov. 4, at least three weeks sooner than what’s now normal. We don’t need to overthink why.
The Big 12 added a redundant conference title game this year.
The Big 12 reasoned that having a conference championship game would make the league getting a Playoff bid more likely. The math on that is not definitive, and the Big 12 should know the risks of subjecting its teams to a do-or-die title game. The league used to have this game every year (back when it actually made sense, because the league didn’t have a round-robin schedule at the time), and it knocked out several national championship contenders.
The weird thing about the Big 12’s title game is that it’s automatically going to be a rematch. This is a 10-team league, where every team plays a round-robin. There are no divisions, and though league commissioner Bob Bowlsby indicated they were coming when he announced the title game’s creation, they still don’t exist.
There’s some chance that Oklahoma and OSU play in the title game.
Four teams are tied for first place at 4-1. Two are OU and OSU, and the others are Iowa State (!) and TCU. Because the Big 12 doesn’t have divisions, the title game is as simple as pitting first and second place against each other for all the marbles.
It’s not likely that Oklahoma and Oklahoma State wind up in those slots. Before Week 9, there was a 6 percent chance of a Bedlam title game.
Someone’s going to have two conference losses after this weekend, and it’ll require a couple of things to fall into place. Don’t bank on it, but don’t discount it.
It would’ve happened in back-to-back weeks each of the last two years.
The Sooners and Cowboys finished 1-2 in the Big 12 in both of the last two regular seasons. In both seasons, Bedlam was the teams’ last game of the season. Both were huge, with the winner (Oklahoma, in both cases) taking the league crown.
If the teams had gone into Bedlam on the last weekend of the season knowing they’d be meeting again a week later for the title, it wouldn’t have made it meaningless, because there are still playoff and other bowl implications. But it would’ve taken a great on-campus game and made it lesser.
When the Big 12 didn’t have a title game, it made a point to schedule likely marquee games for the end of the season. The idea there was that its good teams would play each other right as the Playoff’s selection committee sorted out the field. OU-OSU happening at the end of the season fit.
Now that the title game exists, the Big 12’s incentives are different.
It doesn’t want the awkwardness that would come two bitter rivals going back-to-back, and it doesn’t want the humiliation of two elite teams trading wins in back-to-back weeks and keeping the league out of the Playoff altogether.
In 2018, Bedlam will happen on Nov. 10 in Norman. Maybe the game will move back to its traditional slot some day, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
The story of the first OSU-Oklahoma football game
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