The return of a Big 12 championship game in football moved a step closer to reality this week. In the past, OU football coach Bob Stoops has not been a fan of having to play one extra game.
The NCAA on Wednesday this week voted to alter its rule of preventing conferences with fewer than a dozen teams from holding a conference championship game in football. This places the final decision on whether to return a championship game to the football schedule up to the 10 existing Big 12 member schools.
Big 12 officials had appealed to the NCAA to waive the 12-team rule, which would allow the Big 12 to hold a championship game without being forced to increase the league structure by adding two more schools for the sole purpose of conducting a championship game.
The catch-22 of this scenario came to a head in 2014 when TCU and Baylor tied for the conference championship with identical 11-1 records and were subsequently left out of the inaugural College Football Playoff.
Because the Big 12 honored the two schools as co-champions and did not recognize “one true champion,” which was in direct contradiction to the conference’s season-long advertising tagline, it was believed that the snub of TCU and Baylor was a direct response by the CFP selection committee to the Big 12 not holding a championship game to determine one league champion. Whether that was in truth what happened, the fact remains that Big 12 officials felt the pressure to seek a change to its present situation to be on an equal playing field with the other power-five conferences.
Seven of the OU football Big 12 championships have come about by winning a conference title game. Since the Big 12 championship was discontinued after the 2010 season – with the departure of Nebraska and Colorado from the conference membership – Oklahoma has been credited to two more conference crowns in football. The Sooners shared the conference championship with Kansas State in 2012, but were outright champions this past season.
Even though the NCAA has voted to change its rule regarding conference championship game requirements in football, it is far from a guarantee that the Big 12 schools will vote to return to a football conference championship game. It is believed that the positions of the 10 member schools are mixed on this subject.
Although Oklahoma would support a league-wide majority vote to hold a championship game, it is not certain that OU is necessarily a proponent of having to play a championship game to determine a league champion. University of Oklahoma President David Boren reiterated his position this week that the conference needs to get out of its reactive mode and be more proactive by expanding its membership and strengthening its position and footing with the other major conferences. Boren said he would like to see Texas’ Longhorn Network go away and be replaced by a universal Big 12 Network, similar to what is in place in the Big Ten and the SEC.
Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in an interview with the Associated Press that the NCAA’s new ruling and the issue of holding a conference championship game in football will be discussed at the next Big 12 meeting, which is scheduled for February.
“I could not forecast how the school athletic directors, presidents and chancellors will vote,” the Big 12 commissioner told the AP, “(but) we accommodated for it in our schedule as early as next season.”