The Big 12 had two teams that had real shots at last year's inaugural College Football Playoff, but Baylor and TCU both missed out — finishing fifth and sixth — because the Big 12 did not name one of them the champion, despite the conference's motto stating that the nine-game head-to-head schedule would create "one true champion."
While it's conference tournament time for basketball, it's also an opportunity for the Big 12 schools to all meet while in Kansas City and discuss things like football tiebreakers, and as Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby put it, they need to make a change to try and avoid a situation like last year.
"We probably don't want to be different in more than one way than the other conferences." Bowlsby told the Dallas Morning News earlier this week. "We need to have some other way to determine a champion."
The conference's athletic directors reportedly had a meeting while in Kansas City and discussed how to go about getting rid of the co-champions nonsense. According to the Wichita Eagle the conference is moving towards an agreement that will actually result in "one true champion" being crowned, and the tiebreaker — as it probably should have been last year — will be the head-to-head matchup.
The Big 12 doesn't have to have a conference championship game to keep pace with the other conferences — although it probably wouldn't hurt — and that got too much discussion last year. The problem was that the conference refused to acknowledge either Baylor or TCU as the conference's champion — despite Baylor having the head-to-head — and declared them co-champions. The Playoff committee never said it outright, but you have to think while making their selections the committee wasn't going to make a determination on which co-champion was best and it was easier to leave both off in lieu of the other four conference champions.
With a new tiebreaker system likely in place by next fall and a Big 12 athletic director on the committee this year — Texas Tech's Kirby Hocutt — we'll see if the conference has better luck with the selection process in 2015, should any of their teams be in contention.
