For Big 12 football championship, the right move is no move

PHOENIX — One week after Bob Bowlsby suggested his league had to do something about being left out of the first 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,” said Bowlsby after meeting Tuesday with the league’s athletic 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 believed 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 added, “I surmise we would probably move in that direction.”

Instead, after significant opposition from several athletic 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 athletic director Kirby Hocutt, who is also a newly minted member of the selection committee.

There was time for a few more deep breaths, anyway. 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. Along with the ACC, the Big 12 is pushing for it, but if it happens, it wouldn’t be until sometime next fall. The Big 12 could reassess then, if it wanted.

“We want to have that option on the table,” Hocutt said. “We want the waiver.”

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.

“One year doesn’t make a trend,” Bowlsby said. “Let’s see how this goes forward.”

The Big 12 might have been a few plays away from having both Baylor and TCU in the playoff. What if Georgia Tech had pulled off a brewing upset of Florida State in the ACC championship game, or Ohio State had only beaten Wisconsin by say, two touchdowns?

“There’s just a lot of things that could have happened,” Patterson said. “I think every year it changes when it comes to how you want to look at the situation.”

A conference championship game is just as likely to knock a team out of the playoff as to propel it into one. Just ask Ohio State in 2013. The Buckeyes were headed for the BCS championship game until they were upset by Michigan State in the Big Ten championship. As Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said last week, “it cuts both ways.”

But even if it gets left out again, the Big 12 doesn’t seem likely to add a conference championship.

“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 has “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.

Sure, it hurt. And it did not help that the Big 12 declined to designate Baylor, which had beaten TCU, as the league’s champion and thus made a mockery of its “One True Champion” slogan. Baylor’s weak nonconference schedule didn’t help, either.

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 athletic directors briefly discussed dialing back to an eight-game schedule, but no one liked the idea.

“We felt we should keep it the way it is, and that it shouldn’t be about who we played and who we didn’t play,” Bowlsby said.

It also shouldn’t be about who they played twice. Adding a conference championship game would automatically put its best team, at least according to the standings, in double jeopardy. And it wouldn’t always be teams as evenly matched as Baylor and TCU (Baylor won by three points at home last October).

“You could have a 9-0 team playing a 6-3 team,” Briles said. “That could happen. Those are implications that need to be looked at. It’s not always gonna be 8-1 against 8-1.”

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 every member play at least one Power Five nonconference opponent (as the SEC has done) each season. And if they’re really serious, it could prohibit scheduling FCS opponents. Bowlsby said nonconference scheduling is a discussion item on Wednesday’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 athletic directors made the point that they’re already playing nine conference games (one more than the SEC and ACC 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.

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