The Big 12 is a ten-team conference. It determines its conference champion in the fairest way possible, by requiring its schools to play a round-robin nine-game conference schedule.
That, of course, isn’t good enough. With no championship game, there’s money being left on the table. With no championship game, there’s a feeling that something’s missing for the CFP selection committee to weigh in comparison with the other P5 conferences that have championship games.
And so, even though it’s completely unnecessary, and in fact is just as likely to make things messier in the event that the team which lost in the regular season comes back to win the conference title game, the Big 12 is moving towards having a championship game.
That’s all right with Bill Hancock.
… Hancock praised the Big 12’s decision to reinstitute a championship game in 2017, mirroring the other four major conferences. He emphasized, though, that the primary benefit is not necessarily the fact that all champions will now play 13 games but that the Big 12’s champ will now add another top 25-caliber opponent to its resume.
“How much the Big 12 will be helped by getting another game against a quality opponent — to me, that’s the game-changer,” said Hancock.
That’s a real game-changer, alright. It’s a perfect example of sacrificing the significance of the regular season to enhance the postseason chase. And it’s the path that college football, just like men’s basketball before it, is steadily traveling down. The morons running the game are slowly destroying the character that makes college football unique, the emphasis on regional interest and the regular season.
I’ll keep saying it: enjoy what you’ve got now, folks, because ten years from now, it won’t be the same. Not even close.
Get The Picture 
Good morning, Bluto. Sorry to thread jack but how about a post on your car with a photo. You waited so long to get it, I’d like to hear how much you’re enjoying it.
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Really? I didn’t want to sound like I’m gloating about it.
It was definitely worth the wait, I’ll say that.
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IF it’s a sports car, let’s hope it has 3 pedals. 🙂
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I’m sixty. Every car I’ve owned since I left college, with the exception of one mistake, has had a manual tranny. But I’m tired of driving a manual in rush hour traffic, I had some bursitis in my left knee a couple of years ago that was literally a pain when I shifted gears… and my wife refuses to drive a stick anymore.
So, no, I don’t have three pedals. But the transmission is a dual-clutch semi-automatic, so I haven’t completely abandoned my roots. 😉
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Had to go with an automatic long ago. Kept spilling my cocktail when I’d shift the manual tranie. Same reason I quit jogging.
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I can still shift gears manually, as car has paddle shifters. I’ve just farmed out the clutchwork. 🙂
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Hell yes. I would absolutely love to see a picture of it and read about your experience. I enjoy seeing Dawgs accomplish their goals. We share in your joy of college football. Let us share in your joy of the Cayman.
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Since Missouri and Texas A&M aren’t going anywhere, I think the Big 12 should pick up Memphis and Houston to get to 12 actual teams.
Divide into two divisions:
Division A:
Kansas
Kansas State
Memphis
Texas
Texas Tech
West Virginia
Division B:
Baylor
Houston
Iowa State
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
TCU
Follow the old SEC model: rest of division + 1 permanent + 1 rotating. Permanent opponents:
Kansas-Baylor
Kansas State-Houston
Memphis-Iowa State
Texas-Oklahoma
Texas Tech-Oklahoma State
West Virginia-TCU
Add championship game. Also, more opportunities for OOC. Problem solved. Senator, I know you like the fairness of round-robin play, but personally I find division play more compelling, so the idea of the Big 12 picking up a couple more schools and having a championship game is appealing to me. Plus the idea of requiring Texas to have to go to Memphis every other year kind of makes me giggle.
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It’s all about the money, and those two add exactly zero to the value of the Big XII’s media rights given their geographic footprint. Memphis adds eyeballs in western Tennessee but that’s about it. Houston adds nothing to what the conference currently has, and when Tom Hermann (sp?) leaves to take over at Austin, Auburn, Norman, etc., they’re back to being as valuable as Baylor or TCU.
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Since they bring very little to the conference troth, you could probably argue Memphis and Houston have negative value because the revenue share splits for the existing schools would most likely decline on a proportional basis (other than Texas) with more mouths to feed.
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I can’t argue with that. I was thinking more in terms of how you get the Big 12 to a conference championship game while opening things up for more extensive OOC play, not in terms of media markets.
The fact that your point is a valid one – media markets being more important than competitive considerations – really goes a long way towards making the Senator’s point that things aren’t the way they used to be and that probably isn’t a good thing. Tell me if I’m right, Bluto.
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“Follow the old SEC model: rest of division + 1 permanent + 1 rotating. ”
I wish we would go to 9 SEC games and rotate all 3 cross-division opponents annually. That way we would play the West teams more often. Is that even possible to schedule?
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You would give up the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry as an annual game in exchange for a visit to Starkville or Fayetteville more often? No thanks. One permanent and 2 rotating? Fine.
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Do you want GT to be the only OOC team that Georgia faces in the regular season?
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Georgia played Ga Southern, Southern, and ULM last season. There’s room for a 9 game conference schedule.
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Agree, dawgtired. And if that means playing GT every four years or so, great. We should only play them in Athens anyway, if they don’t like it, let them walk.
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Boooo! to you and dt. Since when do old farts not want a beatdown on GT every year until eternity as payback for those years of crowing we had to endure with Dodd? Do you guys have these terrible brain farts often? Time for a senility check guys. 🙂
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But brackets are where it’s at. We want a tournament that lasts as long as March Madness, so we can all fill out our picks on thewwl.com. Who cares if one team beat another (or in the Big XII’s case beat everyone else) in the regular season or won the conference championship? All that matters is the CFP now.
These greedy idiots are going to ruin the best regular season in sports.
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The B12-4+2 is a holding action.
We already effectively have 3 rounds of playoffs. Round 4 is coming soon.
Yea.
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Hancock’s stupidity shows in his position that the Big 12 champion will be adding another top 25 opponent. If fact, it is not, since it will have already played that opponent. It is just playing two games against the same opponent.
If I was on the committee I would not be that impressed that the best team in the Big 12 beat another team twice.
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If I were on the committee, I would downplay the team that did beat the regular season champion. It would make me more likely to leave the Big XII champion out of the playoff similar to the situation they tried to pull with TCU and Baylor two years ago.
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Yes, while I prefer the Big 12 actually get back to actually having 12 teams, or more, I would penalize them in my evaluation if they don’t play a championship game in a close heat with someone that did. I also think the Domers should be penalized for not playing in one. Get in a conference or be prepared to be significantly better than any other contender that is a conference champ from a conference championship game.
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If they choose to emulate the SEC, their entire conference should be examined top-to-bottom for the competition level that is expected in the SEC. They would fail miserably in comparison, especially since Baylor is heading for conference de-capping this year.
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Not sure I buy your last comment at all. IF anything, I think it might be even better.
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If the regular season is steak sauce then the post season is steak. Who in their right mind would complain that they don’t want their steak any bigger because there won’t be enough steak sauce to go around? It makes no sense. At some point you have to realize that some traditions are stupid. I understand nostalgia, I grew up watching bowl games, and then one day about 10 years ago I woke up and asked myself why I cared about meaningless games where the winner gets no prize or title? Bowl games = exhibition games no matter how traditional they are. Nobody cares who won the Sugar Bowl in 2012. I’m not necessarily interested in a 32 team playoff, but I’d take that over the stupidity of the BCS (and everything before it) any day of the week.
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To me, and this is just my opinion, your analogy is 180° wrong. The regular season is the steak, post season is just sauce. And a weak sauce at that. It’s appointed/chosen by a committee to try to please the most people. Bah, humbug, GetOffMyLawn 😆
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Yeah, I really miss the old days when a couple of early losses could put an end to your season and any shot of winning a title. How’s that for an important regular season?
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If you think about it, that’s pretty important.
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Care to expound?
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If multiple regular season losses preclude you from winning a title as compared to a team without multiple regular season losses, it would seem to me that the regular season mattered more than some arbitrary post-season tournament where half the participants get to press a reset button on an average / mediocre season. It’s as if every game matters or something.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a post-season tournament if that’s your bag, btw. Please just don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that an extended post-season doesn’t cheapen the regular season which is CFB’s crown jewel compared to other American sports.
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How is a post season arbitrary? You’re seeded based on your regular season, they go hand in hand. Championship games are arbitrary we can agree there, but how often have we seen a team with losses win a title against an undefeated team who ran the table with a weak schedule?
Yes, in the current format the regular season seems more important unless you’re the team with multiple losses and your title hopes are dashed in October. Then the rest of the season really means nothing, unless of course you value rivalry games and annual bragging rights, but a playoff would take nothing away from that.
I’ve got news about your crown jewel, it doesn’t hold a candle to the ratings that the NFL is pulling during the regular season, and they have an expanded playoff with only 32 teams to pull from. Imagine the possibilities with 120 cfp teams in the field.
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I thought this was a CFB-centric blog. The fundamental flaw in your argument is you assume I give a shit about the NFL or what it does.
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“CFB’s crown jewel compared to other American sports.”
The NFL is an american sports league. You’re thinking CFB’s regular season is a crown jewel, but the rest of the country would disagree. I’m not assuming anything, I’m just responding directly to what you said.
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You’re implying the NFL regular season has merit because of its ratings. I’m saying that the CFB regular season is meaningful for other more personal reasons. My value proposition has nothing to do with TV ratings. However, you’ve mischaracterized my comments by conflating my value with yours. That’s all I was saying.
Neither of us is wrong here, I just value the CFB set-up where a loss in September matters just as much as a loss in November. I value that an undefeated CFB team isn’t going to sit its starters in the final week of the season when it has a playoff seed locked up.
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Got it, the cfb regular season is a crown jewel because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. I get it. What I’m telling you is this whole devaluing of the regular season is mostly hot air.
For instance, I can’t think of a single scenario in which a team would sit its starters under an 8 team playoff format unless they were trying to get a lower seed for some reason. Think about how much a loss effects a team’s standing currently. There are 120 teams gunning for 8 spots I don’t see how the math could ever work out for a team to sit players unless there was an undefeated team and everyone else had at least two losses. Even then I doubt it would ever happen especially since the last week of the season consists of conference championship games.
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Tell that to an ACC basketball fan from the 1970’s.
We’re not even there yet and you’re already assuming it goes there as a natural order of things. What about when we get to 16 or 32? Hell – why not 64? That’s my point. You add 4 or 5 games to the “post-season” that have outweighed importance to the regular season and inevitably add a bunch of 8-4 teams to fill those spots and I don’t see any argument for how the regular season isn’t devalued.
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Confirmed.
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Basketball and football are two pretty different animals. Not that they’re beyond comparison, but there is a high degree of structural variance between the two (ie basketball plays more than twice the amount of regular season games). Your point is taken though. If it gets beyond 12 teams I’ll tend to agree with you, but there is a lot of more money tied to a regular season football game than there ever was in a basketball game, so I highly doubt they’ll go beyond 8 teams and mess with that revenue which is essentially fixed. I’m no economist though.
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Rivalry games and annual bragging rights are exactly the reasons I have (had?) and emotional attachment to CFB far the the NFL has no chance of ever capturing. I’ll openly admit I don’t give a shit about this from a money making perspective (which is how you’re doing it and what the decision makers are doing). I’m looking at it from the perspective of what made me a CFB fan in the first place and that had jack shit to do with bracket madness and playoff excitement. The day that the winner of Auburn / Georgia ceases to matter in the grand scheme of things is the day I pick something else to do on Saturdays.
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It will never cease to matter as long as it matters to you and I, what does a playoff have to do with it? If the Georgia Auburn game mattered to you last season then it will always matter regardless of postseason expansion. Neither of those teams were going anywhere.
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Jeez, man, I’ve got hundreds of posts on the BCS/playoffs. Go read ’em.
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Ha, I was thinking/hoping you had something new for me. I’ve said it before, we agree on a lot of cfb issues, but this is another one that I doubt I’ll ever understand from you’re perspective.
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Fair enough. Boring world (and blog) if we all agreed on everything.
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your*
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The committee is stupid though. We can agree on that. I’d actually be fine selecting the top four (or 6-12) teams based on BCS rankings. As long as computers aren’t picking just two team it would make more sense than a committee.
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Ah something I can agree with. This human selection committee arrangement is BS. The Committee should design an initial formula based on what they vote are the criteria. These should be made public and a computer company that has no competing interest in CFB ratings should be selected to write the program. At the beginning of every season the Committee should review the formula and modify it if the Committee votes to change it. Then starting in November they just compile the numbers and run the program. If ESPN wants to copy the program for broadcast purposes so be it. Now you have removed all the BS from the system and all the personal bias.
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Well put
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Computer models are what started this committee crap. No way the powers that be are going back to that. I would have been ok with a 4-team format with the BCS formula for the selection.
8-team champions only would be the way to go, but there’s no way the structural changes and realignment for competitive balance that would be necessary to make that work is going to happen.
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