Big 12 can have its (championship) cake -- but must stop scheduling cupcakes, too
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A toast: To cake, and eating it, too!
The Big 12 Conference spent the last year or so stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place, between wanting a football championship game -- current regulations require at least 12 teams in a league to throw that kind of party -- and not wanting to expand its membership, given the scraps on the table that haven't already been scooped up by the ACC. Plus, the desire not to thin the per-school slices coming out of the league's television pie tin. So greed, basically.
But enough suits were ruffled on the administrative end that it looks as if the aforementioned 12-team cover charge for a title contest is going the way of the compact disc. Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com reported earlier this week that legislation that would deregulate conference championship games -- legislation co-authored by the Big 12, it should be noted -- is likely to be passed by 2016.
Clear path to that darned College Football Playoff, right? Dr Pepper for everybody! ("Celebration" by Kool & The Gang blares over the loudspeakers.)
"You know, it's up to the conferences to determine how they choose their champions," was all College Football Playoff CEO Bill Hancock would politely say on the matter. "And the (CFP) committee will take the champions under consideration."
(And "Celebration" grinds to a halt, replaced by the sound of a record needle scratching as it slides off the LP.)
So this is great and awesome and groovy and whatever. Fine.
Guarantees you nothing.
Except an excuse to throw a party, presumably at Jerry World. Also fine.
You can change the rules all you like, but you can't change ... well, math.
Lookin' good! Check out our gallery of Big 12 football cheerleaders.
With the Big 12 going to a title game -- we'll assume it'll match up the top two teams as designated by the running CFP poll, because otherwise, what would be the point, and divisional alignment by geography (cough, West Virginia, cough) is a giant migraine in waiting -- that makes five Power Five conference champions to consider. As long as the CFP is football's Final Four -- and not Great Eight, or Sweet 16, or whatever hoops parallel you like -- some program with a gaudy record, a nice resume and salivating boosters is going to miss the cut.
(We'll leave the fact that Baylor and TCU, the two Big 12 co-champs left out of the party in 2014, are both small, private, provincial institutions, and the fact Ohio State and Florida State, which snatched the last two seats, are both very much neither small nor private, for the conspiracy theorists to chew on. But we won't necessarily argue with them, either.)
Venerated Kansas State coach Bill Snyder, who still remains two steps ahead of the rest of us mortals, had been lobbying the league for years to bring the championship and divisions back, even if it meant expanding the footprint to more strange bedfellows (BYU? Cincinnati? Central Florida?). The first painful 2014-15 CFP cut -- sorry, Big 12 -- proved Snyder right (again) on the big point, although it's hard to imagine two five-team divisions that wouldn't leave some kind of burr in the chaps of the Lone Star power bloc.
To put it another way: Good luck trying to convince, say, Oklahoma that it shouldn't share a division with either Oklahoma State or Texas.
Besides, those old North-South arguments were part of the fissures that drove the Nebraskas and Missouris and Colorados away, the fissures that put the Big 12 on the ledge in the first place. Everybody looks after their own first, and we'll grant you, a North-esque division of current membership, even if the current nine-game round-robin league format were to be maintained, could still be very good for K-State.
But some old wounds aren't worth opening up again. Not right now, anyway.
Besides, the primary directive of a Big 12 title game should be twofold:
1) Rake in more boatloads of cash for everybody;
2) Present a league champion -- one true champion -- so appealing to the CFP that its profile stacks up with what the Urban Meyers and Nick Sabans and Jim Harbaughs and Gus Malzahns and Jimbo Fishers are going to toss on the table.
And everything else, really, is side salad.
But to elaborate on point No. 2, most of the responsibility of resume enhancement falls on the schools themselves. Lookin' at you, Bears.
As big-britches college football moves closer to a basketball-playoff platform and a basketball-playoff mentality, basketball-style schedule scrutiny is a part of the picture now. Now and forever.
Team Briles, the ones pouting the loudest, beat SMU, Northwestern State and Buffalo by an average score of a gazillion to 6. And the score was bloody irrelevant.
What was relevant -- and will continue to be -- is that the three soft-tossers on the pre-conference slate ran up a combined record of 12-23 and posted an average Sagarin rating rank of 160.3 out of 252 schools tracked.
TCU's non-cons? Samford, Minnesota and SMU. Average Sagarin: 117.0.
Ohio State? Navy, Virginia Tech, Kent State and Cincinnati. Average Sagarin: 84.3.
Florida State? Oklahoma State, The Citadel, Notre Dame and Florida. Average Sagarin: 68.5.
Slide rule don't lie. The Big 12 can have its cake. It just needs to have its big boppers stop eating so darn much of it in August and September first.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter at @SeanKeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.
