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TCU, Baylor have strong playoff cases but Big 12 still might be toast
FORT WORTH AND WACO, Texas — On the final night of the regular season, roughly 13 hours before the selection committee would render its final verdict, the head coach of one of the contenders got into a tiff with his conference commissioner during the middle of a purportedly celebratory moment.
Welcome to the first-ever College Football Playoff.
On a hastily erected stage where No. 6 Baylor accepted its second straight Big 12 championship trophy Saturday night, Bears coach Art Briles took the microphone and told a feverish crowd: "As the Big 12 states, there's one true champion. It's the Baylor Bears! It's the Baylor Bears!"
The Baylor Bears beat the ninth-ranked Kansas State Wildcats in impressive fashion Saturday night, 38-27, in a game the selection committee surely would agree the home team controlled from the start. Unfortunately for Baylor, though, it forever will share the 2014 Big 12 championship with TCU, which completed its own 11-1 season with its own dominant performance earlier Saturday, trouncing 2-9 Iowa State, 55-3. A TCU team the Bears beat, 61-58, on Oct. 11.
The fact the Big 12 insists on recognizing both as champs figured to present the selection committee with an all-out headache overnight Saturday as they began their deliberations, given it's supposed to reward conference champions and given it had TCU three spots ahead of the team it lost to as of last week. That paradox also is the reason why Briles got into a heated exchange with commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who eventually left the field walking through a throng of venom-spewing Baylor fans, many of whom had chanted the conference's now-infamous "One True Champion" slogan earlier.
"You're going to slogan around and say One True Champion, and all of a sudden you're going to go out the back door instead of the front? Don't say one thing and do another," Briles told reporters afterward. "That's my whole deal."
It was a much different scene eight hours earlier at Amon G. Carter Stadium after TCU got done trouncing the hapless Cyclones. A gracious coach Gary Patterson told his crowd to celebrate the fact the Horned Frogs were Big 12 co-champions. And he did very little playoff campaigning in his postgame press conference.
Asked if he'd be mad Sunday if the committee opts not to include TCU in the Final Four, Patterson offered some rare perspective amidst the high-stakes playoff frenzy.
"I'd be sad for my kids and this university, because I think they've done everything they can possibly do, and I don't think we did anything today to hurt ourselves," he said " ... Upset or mad is UAB dropping football. To me, that's upset or mad — coaches lost their jobs and kids don't have a place to play; they don't have a bowl game. We'd be disappointed."
Of course, it's easier to be courteous when you're the incumbent, so to speak. Not to mention, at that early stage of the day, Patterson had no way of knowing who exactly his competition would be come Sunday. As it turned out, the rest of the field did not make the committee's decision any easier. None of them lost.
Following No. 2 Oregon's likely playoff-clinching rout of Arizona in Friday night's Pac-12 championship game, No. 1 Alabama followed suit by pasting Missouri 42-13 in Atlanta. Half the field seemingly was wrapped up before a trio of prime-time games in which all three contenders involved made an emphatic final statement.
No. 4 Florida State, the undefeated team that had been losing ground by the week, went to 13-0 with yet another down-to-the-wire finish, but this one, a 37-35 win over No. 11 Georgia Tech, marked the highest-ranked foe the 'Noles have defeated this season. They're presumably in, too.
Which leaves just one spot.
TCU couldn't have done much more against Iowa State to retain its footing, with quarterback Trevone Boykin completing 30 of 41 passes for 460 yards and four touchdowns and catching a 55-yard touchdown pass. The Horned Frogs' defense held the Cyclones, who've moved the ball on people, to 236 total yards and 3-of-18 third downs.
"I think we're one of the best in the country — I KNOW we're one of the best in the country," TCU running back Aaron Green said. "I think the nation knows that, too. We're not a big glamor school, but when we put the pads on, it's a whole different story."
But this is not the BCS, where TCU would move down only if it lost. The committee already has shown it's willing to reorder teams as it sees fit, and this last poll always figured to be the most volatile. Teams' bodies of work finally are complete. Front-loaded and back-loaded schedules finally meet in the middle.
Baylor certainly is banking on the committee taking a more favorable view of its final résumé. Long after Saturday night's game ended, the video board at McLane Stadium displayed a giant graphic: "Settled on the Field," with scores of their games against then-No. 9 TCU (61-58), then-No. 15 Oklahoma (48-14) and No. 9 K-State (38-27).
"Look at the résumés and find four that are better," Briles said, while acknowledging that Oklahoma's season-ending upset loss to Oklahoma State may have hurt its cause. "We probably had the best road win out of anyone in the nation this year (at Oklahoma), because that's a hard place to go win. We beat a top-five team (TCU). And we beat a top-10 team (Kansas State)."
But the team that threw a real wrench in things Saturday night was No. 5 Ohio State. Many expected the Buckeyes, having lost yet another star quarterback, J.T. Barrett, to a season-ending injury, would struggle in the Big Ten title game against Wisconsin. Instead, in complete opposite fashion, Ohio State humiliated committee member Barry Alvarez's Badgers, 59-0, making a very convincing 11th-hour argument that they're one of the four best today.
And because of that, talk turned late Saturday to the possibility that the only Power 5 conference with multiple champions might wind up the lone member of the group left out come Sunday. After all, the committee could just bump up Ohio State and be done with it.
"It'd be extremely disappointing to everyone in the conference [if neither TCU nor Baylor makes it]," Baylor AD Ian McCaw said.
It's anyone's best guess what the committee does because it's never done this before, but whatever they decide, two fan bases are going to be apoplectic. Because their teams all have good cases.
Though they also find themselves in this position because they're flawed.
Baylor's best argument is that it beat one of the other contenders, TCU. But it also played a comical non-conference schedule, and it lost by two touchdowns to a 7-5 West Virginia team.
Ohio State's best argument is that it notched lopsided victories against two current Top 15 teams, Michigan State and Wisconsin, both away from home. But that's also the extent of the Buckeyes' ranked competition, and they lost at home early in the season to a 6-6 Virginia Tech team.
TCU's best argument is that it's arguably the most consistent team in the country. It never scored fewer than 31 points in a game. It notched a solid non-conference victory over 8-4 Minnesota, beat Kansas State even more decisively than Baylor did (41-20) and, in the only game it lost, never trailed until the winning field goal went through the uprights with no time remaining.
But of course, that loss was to Baylor, the basis of the entire One True Champion mess.
Patterson attempted to downplay the head-to-head factor Saturday by pointing out that Oregon originally lost head-to-head to the Arizona team that the Ducks wound up throttling in their rematch. "And [Arizona] beat 'em at their place," he said. "So is Oregon not a good football team?"
While the Big 12 and the College Football Playoff are unchartered territory for him, Patterson in many ways has experienced this before. He was TCU's coach when it played in the Mountain West and had to not only go undefeated but also hope everything aligned perfectly to even play in a BCS bowl, much less play for the national championship. As he pointed out this week, had Boise State not lost to Nevada on Thanksgiving weekend in 2010, his undefeated Rose Bowl team may not even have made a major bowl.
"One of the reasons I've had patience in the playoff thing is TCU's been sitting outside the circle for years," he said. "I don't know what happens [Sunday]. We've done everything we can do. I think we did it at the end of this ballgame the same way we started it, with class.
"So, now we will just wait and watch."
So will the rest of us.
Sunday's unveiling will be a historic moment. It also will be an unavoidably controversial moment. A whole lot of people are going to be considerably madder than Briles was on that stage with the commissioner.
Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. His new book, “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the College Football Playoff,” is now available on Amazon. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.
