The Big 12 conference has been taking a lot of heat for the past two years for not having a conference championship game. Given the emphasis that the College Football Playoff selection committee has on conference title games, most hold the opinion that it would do the Big 12 a favor to adopt one. Well the mob calmed down a bit with commissioner Bob Bowlsby's announcement that the conference will have a championship game if athletic directors vote to have one. Thanks to the conference only having ten teams, the title game would only come down to the top two teams in the conference. However, one Big 12 school president, the University of Oklahoma's David Boren, doesn't think this will automatically fix the Big 12's problems.
"I think if we try to do it piecemeal, we're just gonna kind of end up with just a Band-Aid on top," Boren said via Tulsa World. "I think we need a comprehensive plan to strengthen the conference and give it equal status with the other Power 5 conferences."
Boren believes that the conference game would just be scratching the surface at strengthening the conference — he thinks that it should expand to 12 teams, and in addition be made part of Texas' Longhorn Network. Then he wants a conference title game — all three in that order.
Boren also went into what the conference would look at if it were to expand — something Boren says the Big 12 has been "looking at." Some logical additions, both due to the geographical location of the schools and the state of the programs would be the likes of Houston, SMU or even Memphis.
"We'll look at the fan base, we'll look at the size of their programs, we'll look at the academics of the institutions. We'll look at them comprehensively as to which is the best fit. And also we'll consider geography to a certain degree."
He also stated that during the conference's addition of TCU and West Virginia in 2012, Boren actually lobbied hard for Louisville, who has been in the ACC for the last two seasons. He added that there were times in the past that the conference let teams get away that he would've liked to have seen in the league.
"... Boy, I was very frustrated, for example, that we let Louisville get away and we let other schools get away. We had opportunities at one time several years ago before all these schools gave up their rights, their legal rights and their financial rights, we had a real opportunity, I think back then, to even snag some of the bigger-name programs in the country, and we let the opportunity pass us by — in spite of some of us expressing our frustrations."
Boren's statements are interesting to say the least, but the Big 12 potentially getting a conference title game might fix things in the meantime.
