For the first time since 2010, the Big 12 is holding a conference championship game this season. That’s weird, because the now division-less conference has a nine-game round robin. The Big 12’s will be the only title game in the country that guarantees a rematch.
Oklahoma’s big Bedlam win sets up Big 12 Championship nightmare scenario
The Big 12 Championship Game is now guaranteed to leave the conference exposed in the Playoff race.
Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
The Big 12 says it added the game to improve its chances of placing a team in the College Football Playoff. It was a reactive decision, because 2014 Ohio State made the Playoff over two 11-1 Big 12 teams, TCU and Baylor, who didn’t have a title game. The Big 12 decided it was operating from a position of weakness, so it changed course.
“What we heard was that if we don’t go to a championship game, we’re at a disadvantage,” league commissioner Bob Bowlsby once said. “If we don’t make changes, we’re potentially going into the season with a short stick in our hand.”
But after Saturday, the Big 12 has a scary scenario in play.
Oklahoma beat Oklahoma State in a Bedlam barnburner, and TCU eased past Texas. That leaves the Sooners 8-1 overall and 5-1 in the Big 12. TCU has an identical set of records, tied in first place.
The Horned Frogs visit the Sooners this Saturday. The winner is guaranteed to be alone in first with one loss and two games to go. That team will have a great chance of finishing with an 11-1 record. The last time a Big 12 team did that, the 2015 Sooners made the Playoff without any drama whatsoever.
Sadly for whoever wins Saturday, the conference championship game now exists. That winner will likely still have to play the second-place team in Dallas on Dec. 2 to secure a Playoff spot it probably would’ve had anyway without a title game.
It’s easy to imagine this going horribly awry for the conference.
- Let’s say Oklahoma wins.
- The Sooners then coast through a road game against Kansas and a home game against West Virginia. They’re 11-1 and ranked in the Playoff top four.
- Now say they have to play TCU again in the title game, and they lose. Now the Big 12 has all two-loss teams or worse.
- No two-loss team has made the Playoff in its three-year history. The Big 12 misses the field altogether. The championship game thus does the opposite of its purpose.
A similar scenario could affect TCU. Either way, the Big 12 only gets one one-loss team in the title game, which means it could end that game with none.
We tried to warn the Big 12 about this.
In its past life, this game brought down a handful of national title contenders.
The silly thing: The Big 12’s previous structure worked fine.
Quoting Bill Connelly here:
The idea behind conference title games — beyond “This will make us a lot of money” — is that it’s a healthy way to determine a conference champion when you couldn’t decide such a thing with round-robin scheduling. When conferences moved to 12 teams and beyond, it made sense to break into divisions and have the winners play each other. Sometimes that would produce a rematch, but it wasn’t guaranteed.
The Big 12 plays a perfect round robin, with all 10 teams facing each other each year. The “One True Champion!” mantra (which was relevant for, what, a month or two?) was based on this being a superior method for determining who wins the ring.
The Big 12 was onto something with its old format. After getting a data point it didn’t like in 2014, the conference started chasing its own tail.
It might still be chasing it in a month.
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