Everyone associated with the Big 12 woke up Saturday morning hoping the day would end with Big 12 co-champions TCU and Baylor likely to face Alabama and Oregon in the College Football Playoff Semifinals.
Instead, No. 5 Baylor's season will end in Dallas 11 days earlier than it dreamed, facing No. 8 Michigan State on New Year's Day in the Cotton Bowl.
No. 6 TCU, who fell three spots after a 55-3 win over Iowa State, will face No. 9 Ole Miss in the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl in Atlanta on New Year's Eve.
The disappointment means a long offseason for the Big 12 full of questions that must be answered after a fifth consecutive season without a chance to play for the national title in the postseason, lengthening its longest stretch in conference history.
Baylor coach Art Briles and TCU Gary Patterson don't know exactly what went on inside the room and made the 12 College Football Playoff selection committee members choose Big Ten champion Ohio State, but they do know this: If something goes wrong, you don't do the same thing again.
"I was a little bit surprised dropping from 3 to 6," Patterson said in a live TV interview on ESPN, "but (the committee) had their reasons for doing what they needed to do."
Something has to change in the Big 12, and something likely will. The only question is: How much?
Instituting a championship game could be the most obvious change. As I noted back in May, the lack of a title game gave the Big 12 the easiest path to the playoff of any of the five conferences. Every other conference champion played at least nine conference games, but the ninth was a guaranteed premiere game, compared to the Big 12 schedule, where the ninth game would be just any other game.
"We like our path to the playoff. I think it's a good thing we don't have our two best teams playing each other on the last date of the season," Bowlsby told me last May. "One of them's going to lose, and sometimes it's not the right one."
Bowlsby sounded a lot more reasonable seven months ago. The lack of a title game makes it easier on the Big 12, but this year "the right one" to lose would have been Ohio State and Florida State, which would have put two teams into the playoff.
Instead of an advantage, the Big 12's calculated position as the only league without a title game served as a weakness.
That left Bowlsby frustrated and singing a different tune during an interview with ESPN in the wake of Sunday's disappointment.
"It's clear we were penalized for not having a championship game," Bowlsby said. "It would have been nice to know that ahead of time. We were told we had a different model and that wasn't going to penalize us."
The Big 12's future plans might come into focus on Monday when the league's athletic directors meet in New York as part of a National Football Foundation event. The league has previously petitioned, along with the ACC, for the deregulation of conference championships. That would allow the Big 12 to hold a title game despite the lack of 12 members and two divisions, which is otherwise required.
Expansion? The worst-kept secret in the Big 12 is it would love to expand. The best-kept secret, judging by Sunday's speculation, is that there's simply not a strong enough candidate to warrant it. You don't add teams to a conference so you can hold a championship game. You do it if it makes fiscal sense and doesn't water down your product on the field. Otherwise, you end up with Rutgers and Maryland in your conference and can't remember how or why it happened.
As for the championship game, there may be no more painful irony for the Big 12 than the Big Ten's version slingshotting Ohio State into the playoff via a 59-0 shellacking of Wisconsin and Heisman candidate Melvin Gordon.
A Big 12 team within reach of the BCS title game lost five times in the 15-year history of the Big 12 Championship game. Not once did the title game help a Big 12 team win its way into contention.
That's part of the reason for Bowlsby's comments and the Big 12's glee at its current positioning in the playoff world. Until Sunday, that is.
"Presenting us as co-champs," Art Briles said of Baylor and TCU, "I think hurt the cause for both of us."
Outside of deserved ridicule over the Big 12's oft-lampooned "One True Champion" slogan, Briles is wrong.
Bob Bowlsby was an easy target after a bit of flip-flopping from July to December on the tiebreaker (he said Sunday that he "misspoke" in July when he said the Big 12 would always have a champion via head-to-head) and on the slogan, but he wasn't doing anything more than applying an agreed-upon tiebreaker that applied only to the Big 12's automatic qualifying bowl, not to the playoff itself. That's true, even if no one from the Big 12 managed to present a coherent answer on the issue over the last month.
Bowlsby campaigning for one team comes at the cost of denigrating another team's Big 12 title. His job is to remain neutral within the league and promote it outside the league's footprint.
Besides a PR disaster surrounding the tiebreaker, Bowlsby's been an exemplary commissioner who represents the league well and has a respected voice on issues surrounding college athletics. The league's board of directors won't even entertain a change over this issue.
In an alternate universe not far from ours, Florida State and Ohio State lose last week and the Big 12 puts two teams in the playoff because it DID NOT have a championship game and Bowlsby's handling of the Baylor/TCU debate over the last month is hailed as genius.
Instead, here the Big 12 is, wondering how to wipe the Buckeye-flavored egg off its face and get back to competing for national titles in collegiate athletics' flagship sport.
"That will cause us to go back to the drawing board a little bit and think about if we need a different model," Bowlsby said.
That might include adopting the Big Ten's policy of not scheduling FCS teams or pursuing an alliance with another league and/or mandating nonconference games against Power 5 opponents. The SEC and ACC have enacted that policy in the last year.
"If we're 12-0, we're in the Final Four," Briles said.
Yes, but Baylor might also be in the Final Four if its best nonconference opponent, Buffalo, hadn't gone 5-6 with a 10-point loss to 2-10 Eastern Michigan.
The Bears were the only Big 12 team who didn't play a Power 5 opponent in 2014, and Baylor has just one Power 5 time (Duke) on its future schedules through 2019.
The easiest change for the Big 12 would be either mandating tougher nonconference games or strongly, strongly encouraging them at every opportunity in public to shame Baylor into abandoning its "12-0 or bust" philosophy.
Sunday will go down as the darkest day in Big 12 history since its third and fourth members--Texas A&M and Missouri--left the conference.
When that happened, it made proactive, positive changes like agreeing to a grant of rights to prevent the same things from happening in the future. The conference is better off for it.
Bowlsby and the rest of the Big 12 can't sit idle. Changes must be made or the league may find itself in the same position again very soon.
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