It's really all been downhill for the Big 12 ever since the topic of expansion was discussed for the conference.
After the Big 12 declined to expand — thanks to many of the potential candidates being... awful — many questions then rose about how the conference would handle its upcoming conference championship game in 2017. The NCAA changed the rules to allow conferences with less than 12 teams to hold conference championship games, and the Big 12 announced before the expansion decision that they would hold such a game.
Now that decision looks like a complete mess, as the Big 12 announced on Friday that their future title game would be between the teams that finished No. 1 and No. 2 in the conference standings.
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That doesn't sound like a bad idea on paper; it's what they have to deal with as a 10-team conference. However, since the Big 12 didn't expand, their conference title game is now guaranteed to be a rematch of a game that has already taken place during the regular season. This then could lead to a scenario where a team that won the regular season matchup then loses the championship game, thus costing the conference a chance as the College Football Playoff.
But even outside of that scenario, what does the Big 12 gain at all from a now guaranteed rematch in the title game? Even if the top team wins the matchup again, does that really help them at all? Is it worth risking a undefeated season just for the sake of holding a title game?
The whole idea seems poorly thought out. It would have been solved if the conference had agreed to expansion, as then the Big 12 would be in a similar scenario to the other Power 5 conferences. Sure, rematches in the title game are still possible there, but they are much less likely and a winning team is more likely to gain a unique, new victory instead of another win over an opponent they've already played.
