Oklahoma Football: Should OU and Texas Anchor Separate Big 12 Divisions?

The last Big 12 championship game in football was held in 2010, with that season’s South Division-champion Oklahoma football squad winning out over longtime rival Nebraska in the Cornhuskers last football game as a member of the conference.

The Big 12 has announced that it will resume holding a football championship game beginning with the 2017 season, so now the question is how will the two combatants for the newly re-established league title showdown be determined.

Based on what we know today, the likely scenario is to divide the 10-member conference into two equal divisions, like it was previously but with two fewer teams, offered Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby at the recent Big 12 spring meetings held in Irving, Texas. Under that format, the champions of the two divisions would meet in a 13th game, something that has come to be known as the 13th data point, or the deciding factor in determining one true conference champion.

The NCAA removed some of the heavy lifting that stood in the way of the Big 12 re-establishing a football championship game by issuing a deregulation ruling earlier this year that now enables conferences like the Big 12 to hold a championship game with fewer than 12 teams.

The decision to re-institute a conference championship game not only puts the Big 12 on the same playing field as the other Power Five conferences, but also will bring in close to another $30 million in league revenues, which by rule will be divided up among all of the member schools.

Big 12 officials as well as representative of the member institutions have expressed their liking of the current round-robin format in which every team plays every school in the conference, thereby eliminating the possibility of a team winning the conference crown by not having to go through every team in the league to do so.

By adding a 13th game to the schedule, however, a round-robin regular-season schedule will also result in a rematch of an earlier season game. The divisional format is one way to minimize this. Big 12 officials could then organize the schedule so that games with teams in the other division would be played earlier in the season, thus avoiding a rematch in the championship tilt of a late-season contest.

The conference could also elect to keep the league structure as is and have the top two teams in the final regular-season standings meet in the championship game. Tie breakers would, of course, have to be in place, but this scenario could also be problematic in trying to avoid a rematch of a late-season game. For example, Oklahoma clinched its ninth Big 12 regular-season title last season by defeating Bedlam rival Oklahoma State in its final regular-season game. But those same two schools finished one-two in the standings and would have met in the league championship game had there been one in 2015.

Should the league decide to realign again into two equally divided divisions, one scenario that has been floated is to place Red River rivals and Big 12 power brokers Oklahoma and Texas in separate divisions.

Splitting up the two longtime football powers would not be without its own set of upside and downside it would at least create a power balance between the two divisions by separating out the programs with the biggest athletic budgets: Oklahoma and Texas.

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For the sake of argument, Tom Fornelli, a college football writer for CBSSports.com, suggests setting up two divisions that could be known as the Oklahoma Division and the Texas Division. Fornelli says he named them that way because “no matter what, Oklahoma and Texas are going to be the most important schools in the Big 12, and I had to call them (the divisions) something.”

For the same reason he wanted to separate out Oklahoma and Texas and place them in separate divisions, Fornelli wanted avoid having Kansas and Iowa State, historically the two weakest football programs in the conference, in the same division.

In also attempting to keep in-state rivalries in the same division, Fornelli came up with a structure that would have Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, Kansas and Kansas State in the one division, and Texas, TCU, Baylor, Texas Tech and Iowa State in the other division.

I actually see some merit to realigning the divisions the way CBS Sports’ Fornelli is suggesting, assuming new schools are not added to bring the Big 12 membership back to a dozen schools by the start of the 2017 season. The annual Red River Showdown in October in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas would continue as is, and there is also the possibility of a second game between the two Red River rivals if they were to come out on top in their respective divisions.

As long as we are on the subject of potential Big 12 divisional alignments, how about going back to a true North, South dividing line that would include Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State and West Virginia as the Northern teams, and Oklahoma and the four Texas schools (Baylor, TCU, Texas and Texas Tech) making up the South or Southern teams?

How about a Big Eight Division and a Southwest Division? You could have the six remaining schools out of the Big Eight (Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Kansas and Kansas State) and have the West Virginia join with the former Southwest Conference schools (Texas, TCU, Baylor and Texas Tech) to form the other Big 12 division.

It has even been suggested that under the 10-team configuration, you could assure some balance between the two divisions by reseeding the teams every season based on their record the previous season. In other words, teams that finished 1-3-5-7 and 9 could make up one division, and the teams that ended the prior year 2-4-6-8 and 10 in the standings would constitute the other division.

All of this would be for naught, though, if, as some people believe, the decision to re-establish a championship game in football is merely the forerunner to conference expansion to 12 or more teams.

I believe there is a very strong probability that the Big 12 will add at least two more teams and possibly more, although the number of viable prospects drops off fairly fast, in my view, once you get beyond two.

Should the Big 12 return to a membership size that is representative of its conference name, we can begin this fun alignment exercise all over again.