OU Football: Where Would Sooners Land in a Two-Division Big 12 Setup?

Refresher course: When the Big 12 was formed in 1996, the original structure consisted of two divisions, North and South, with the Kansas state line serving as the dividing line, which naturally placed OU football in the South.

The divisional format was dropped at the end of the 2010-11 academic year along with the conference championship game in football. The catalyst for that move was conference realignment.

Big 12 officials announced earlier this year that the football championship game would be reinstated beginning in the 2017 season. That left the door open for potential expansion, which could grow the conference back to its original size of 12 or even 14 members.

Over the summer months the conference leadership identified a prospective list of new member schools and even went so far as to conduct interviews with a good number of them.

Then came the bombshell on Monday. The Big 12 announced earlier this week that it was content with the status quo and will not be adding any new teams. I’m certain there is quite a backstory to all of this, which is sure to come dribbling out later, but for now the long and short of it is: ten teams, no change…get over it.

With the return of a championship game next season, the issue now is how the two teams will be selected. One way would be to leave things the way they are now, allowing the round-robin football schedule to determine the two teams that would meet for the championship (after factoring in a series of tiebreakers).

Another, perhaps more practical solution would be to set up two five-team divisions. The champions of each division would then meet for the conference crown, something that has collectively been referred to as the 13th data point in the accumulated information taken into account by the College Football Playoff selection committee.

Back when the Big 12 began, 20 years ago this year, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State joined with four former Southwest Conference schools (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor) to form the South Division of the new conference. The six remaining schools from the Big Eight made up the North Division.

When Nebraska and Colorado left the Big 12 at the end of the 2010-11 academic year, leaving just 10 teams in the conference, the divisional structure was abandoned.

That has been the situation for the past six years, with Missouri and Texas A&M following Nebraska and Colorado out the door and Texas Christian and West Virginia being admitted into the conference in their stead.

In the beginning, there was an easy geographic divide with the two Oklahoma schools and the four Texas schools. You could still break up the conference that way, with TCU replacing Texas A&M in the South and moving West Virginia into the North. That would leave Texas and Oklahoma, the Big 12’s two biggest programs, in the same division, which some people in the conference have had an aversion to from the very start.

From an economic standpoint, if not national interest, a championship game between Oklahoma and Texas would be an ideal scenario for the conference. Even though the two schools meet annually in their regular-season rendezvous in Dallas, there would be a separation of almost two months between games, which should be ample time not to detract from a championship rematch.

So say you were to separate the Sooners and the Longhorns, what would be a fair and reasonable alignment of teams and divisions with that starting basis.

There is more than one way to go about, but a simple solution would be to put the old Big Eight teams (Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State and Iowa State) in one division, say the North, given that is where three of the five are located geographically. That would leave Texas, TCU, Baylor, Texas Tech and West Virginia to form the South Division.

One glaring problem with such a configuration, though, is that the two weakest football programs historically in the Big 12 would reside in the North, creating a disproportional power balance in football such as what existed in the previous divisional structure.

Well, it’s something to contemplate, anyway, and a nice place to start.

With expansion now off the table, the speculation can now begin on how best to organize the 10 existing member schools, or whether to punt on that issue, as well.