OU Football: Big 12 Will Not Return to Divisions in 2017
By Chip Rouse
There has been plenty of talk in recent months – all speculative, of course – about OU football being part of a new North Division in 2017.
The reason being the return next season of a football championship game in the Big 12 and the structure and process for determining which two teams will play for the conference title.
The Big 12 announced on Friday that the structure of the conference would remain as is and that it would not return to the division structure that was in place previously when the conference held a championship game in football.
This seems like a very pragmatic and simple way of approaching the issue. Given the fact that, with 10 teams and a round-robin schedule, every team plays the other nine teams, it is not really necessary to divide the conference into two five-team divisions. Not to mention the issues inherent in deciding which schools end up in which division.
It is easy enough to put tiebreakers in place to determine the top two teams in the off chance that more than two teams end up with the same conference record at the end of the regular season.
It would be no different than what happened in 2008, when Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech all finished with identical 7-1 records in the Big 12’s South Division. Because Oklahoma lost to Texas that season, Texas Tech beat Texas and the Sooners were responsible for Texas Tech’s one league loss, the conference had to go down several layers in the tiebreaker formula to determine which team would face North Division champion Missouri, with a 5-3 Big 12 record.
Furthermore, the two, and even three, best teams in the Big 12 in 2008 resided in the South, but because of the division format the two best teams in the conference did not play for the championship. More reason not to go back to the way it was before the conference championship game was discontinued.
“Given our round-robin, nine-game scheduling model, it is expected the Big 12 champion will be uniquely positioned for College Football Playoff consideration,” said conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby in a statement released by the Big 12.
“I would argue there will be no path more difficult than our champion’s, where it will have played every team in the conference, faced at least one autonomy conference nonconference opponent and then plays in our championship game,” he added.