For those of you who don’t get why I fret about an expanded college football postseason weakening the significance of the best regular season in organized sport, consider that the Big 12 is weighing the idea of moving its last week of regular season games to the same weekend as other conferences’ championship games so it won’t get lost in the shuffle by the selection committee.
But after finishing their regular season on the last weekend of November, the Sooners fell from the No. 3 slot to No. 4 in the final Playoff ranking – leaving Big 12 members wondering whether and how much they were impacted by not having that 13th game (or in the parlance of the selection committee, a “13th data point”). Oklahoma was one of six teams in its conference sitting out while other Playoff contenders were still playing.
“You just want to have a presence,” TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte said. “It’s not about a statement game. It’s about being relevant that day.”
Twenty years from now, these guys are going to wonder what happened to them. And they still won’t really know.