Berry Tramel explores ten reasons for the Big 12’s apparent decline in this piece. From the point of view of somebody who thinks playing a round robin schedule is the best way for a conference to determine its champion, for me, this sucks to read:
… The 10-school format makes for a great regular season, but it comes at a two-fold cost. The nine-game conference schedule makes it difficult for a team to go through the conference unscathed, and no conference championship game puts the Big 12 at a decided disadvantage with its four chief competitors, all of whom play that 13th game.
Playoff expansion will force the regular season to become ever more cookie cutter, as conferences will have little choice but to mold themselves into vehicles that have the best chance of delivering their teams to the postseason. And given that no matter what they do, there are still only so many slots, it’s pretty obvious where things are headed.
Get The Picture 
Within 10 years, I’m afraid the game that we know and love is going to be “Gone with the Wind.” In the words of Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow.
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Take a good look ee. It will be an historic moment you can tell your grandchildren about – how you watched college football disappear and morph into a semi-pro league in ten years.
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Everyone is talking about the round-robin and how it hurt the B12. What everyone is really missing is how the committee selected Ohio State. Does anyone in their right mind think that the Bucknuts go in over Texas and Oklahoma tied at the top and higher ranked as Baylor and TCU were? Me neither. The committee is selecting based on brand for TV viewing over everything else.
AHD, I don’t pretend to think pay-for-play isn’t coming. It’s pretty much semi-pro ball now. What I absolutely hate is to pay for all of this they are going to kill the best regular season in sports.
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“What I absolutely hate is to pay for all of this they are going to kill the best regular season in sports.” That’s the nuts of it EE. Not that anybody seems to care what we think. Not now, anyway.
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Totally agree. I was making a feeble attempt at playing off your “Gone with the Wind” While you were quoting Scarlet I was doing my best Rhett Butler. 😉
Rhett Butler:Take a good look my dear.It’s an historic moment you can tell your grandchildren about – how you watched the Old South fall one night.
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Well done, AHD. I missed it.
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This. 100%. The committee got a gift that those two teams were TCU and Baylor. No way would they have had the cojones to jump OSU over UT or OU. Fell into their laps. Easy peasy.
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I have enjoyed the SEC Championship game myself. Much better than the way it used to be…
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2.4 draft picks per team to 2.1 draft picks per team with 10 teams. What a collapse, the conference needs to act now! I agree QB play and the slides of UT/OU are the issue, and far bigger problems. It has nothing to do with a 9 game round robin or lack of a conference championship. Slow summers make the media create stories to push memes.
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If it had been Texas/Oklahoma rather than TCU/Baylor they wouldn’t have been left out.
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Yep – good call
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’twas!
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Once again: We need a Power Four and not a Power Five. Each conference has two divisions and a championship game. The division champs make up your Round of 8 in an 8-game playoff. The division champs are the Final Four. That way you get an eight-team playoff with no more games being played than what’s being played now except for the Big 12, which is going that way anyway.
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Meant to say “conference champs” were the Final Four.
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It’s a great idea but the ACC and Big 12 aren’t going down without a fight. No network is going to pay for a playoff where ND has no chance to get in and the Irish have made it abundantly clear they have no interest in joining any conference as a football member.
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ee, if the SEC made a play for Oklahoma and Okie State and simultaneously the PAC 12 made a play for Texas and TCU, overnight the Big 12 would cease to exist. Those remaining 6, i.e. Kansas, K-State, Iowa State, Baylor, Texas Tech and West Virginia (a team that shouldn’t be in the Big 12 anyway) would all be left scrambling to get into any other major conference they could. Some would get into the Big 10 or the ACC (Kansas is a big-time basketball program and might pull off one or the other) but most will end up on the trash heap. I agree–there need to be 4 major conferences for football and from where I sit the Big 12 is the weakest and most likely to go down.
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Tramel’s reasoning makes no sense. Playing nine games is a disadvantage because it creates an extra stumbling block, but not having a conference title game, i.e. an extra stumbling block, is also a disadvantage.
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Agreed. But I think it’s indicative of the mindset of those running Big 12 football these days.
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